page_title: Six Sonatas for Violin and Harpsichord, BWV 1014–1019
section_title: German-speaking countries
hierarchical_section_title: Six Sonatas for Violin and Harpsichord, BWV 1014–1019 / Reception and legacy / German-speaking countries
caption_attribution_description: German: Anna Amalie, Prinzessin von Preußen.
context_page_description: The six sonatas for violin and obbligato harpsichord BWV 1014–1019 by Johann Sebastian Bach are works in trio sonata form, with the two upper parts in the harpsichord and violin over a bass line supplied by the harpsichord and an optional viola da gamba. Unlike baroque sonatas for solo instrument and continuo, where the realisation of the figured bass was left to the discretion of the performer, the keyboard part in the sonatas was almost entirely specified by Bach. They were probably mostly composed during Bach's final years in Cöthen between 1720 and 1723, before he moved to Leipzig. The extant sources for the collection span the whole of Bach's period in Leipzig, during which time he continued to make changes to the score.
context_section_description: In the period 1700–1750, the trio sonata form became a sine qua non in the musical world. It incorporated all the ideals of harmony, melody and counterpoint espoused by theorists such as Mattheson, Scheibe and Quantz. In his treatise Der Vollkommene Capellmeister of 1739, Mattheson wrote that, ... es müssen hier alle drey Stimmen, jede für sich, eine feine Melodie führen; und doch dabey, soviel möglich, den Dreyklang behaupten, als obes nur zufälliger Weise geschehe: "Here each of the three voices must separately provide a fine melodic line; yet all the while together they must sustain as much as possible the three part harmony, as if by serendipity." Amongst all composers of that era, Bach was the one who raised the trio sonata form to its highest degree of perfection. In 1774 Bach's son Carl Philip Emmanuel commented that even after fifty years his father's compositions of this kind still sounded very good and that the lyricism of several of his adagios had never been surpassed. This continued veneration for these particular works even long after his death probably sprang not only from the fact that the form matched Bach's own compositional ideals—that all voices should "work wondrously with each other" (wundersam durcheinander arbeiten)—but also from the succeeding generation's preference for "sensitive" melodies. Perhaps even more influential was Bach's elevation of the harpsichord from a continuo instrument to a prominent obbligato instrument, on equal terms with the solo instrument, whilst also providing the bass line. As Stowell (1992) comments, with his sonatas for violin and obbligato keyboard "Bach triggered off the gradual demise of the sonata for violin and continuo," even though it lived on in a few eighteenth century volin sonatas, for example those of Bach's German contemporaries Johann Adam Birkenstock, Johann David Heinichen, Gottfried Kirchhoff and Johann Georg Pisendel. 
  In the second half of the eighteenth century in Germany, the sonatas were transmitted through hand copies made by Bach's pupils and circle from Leipzig. During that period Berlin rose to prominence as the centre of musical activities in Germany. The court of Frederick the Great, where Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach was appointed harpsichordist in 1740, had a number of exceptional violinists, including Johann Gottlieb Graun, the violin teacher of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, and Franz Benda, another of Graun's pupils. In Berlin Princess Anna Amalia, the sister of Frederick the Great, was a keen amateur keyboard player and from 1758 had Bach's pupil Johann Kirnberger as her music teacher: since 1751 he had been employed as another of Frederick's court violinists.  Anna Amalia's music library—the Amalienbibliothek, now incorporated in the Berlin State Library—contained a large collection of Bach manuscripts, including a hand copy of the sonatas. Many musical compositions from her collection were transmitted to Vienna by Baron van Swieten, the Austrian ambassador to Berlin: starting in the 1770s, van Swieten ran his only weekly salon in Vienna devoted to the music of Bach. Bach's music was also performed in Berlin outside the royal court. The family of Daniel Itzig, banker to Frederick the Great and his father, provided a cultural milieu for musical connoisseurs: four of his daughters, Sara, Zippora, Fanny and Bella (maternal grandmother of Felix Mendelssohn), were all keyboard players.
  Sara was the most gifted harpsichordist in the Itzig family, of professional standard. When Wilhelm Friedemann Bach moved to Berlin from Dresden, she took lessons from him and provided him with some financial support in his old age. Through Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel, she acquired a collection of hand copies of Bach manuscripts, including copies of the first and third sonatas (BWV 1014 and BWV 1016). After her marriage to the banker Samuel Salomon Levy in 1784, she ran a weekly musical salon in their residence on the Museuminsel. Sara herself performed in public, including performances at the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin, from its foundation in 1791 unti
caption: Princess Anna Amalie
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