*Altnickol.
The prelude (Vor deinen Thron) was added to the first edition, and CPE
said explicitly in the preface that it was to compensate for the lack of
a complete final fugue.
Also, Bach had started seeing it through the press, although exactly how
well he could literally see isn’t, well, clear.
Modern speculation is that is was intended to be Clavierübung V.
To the best of my knowledge, Bach had not started preparing AoF for publication: what’s your source on this? Is there any record of the printing application, or was it something said by CPE? If the latter, it fits with my thoughts that none of the sons knew what Bach was up to in his final years/
AoF as it stands in it’s printed form is brilliant but an absolute mess.
From the Wikipedia article:
Mus. ms. autogr. P 200, Beilage 1 contains a final preparatory revision of the Canon in Hypodiatesseron, under the title Canon p[er] Augmentationem contrario Motu crossed out. The manuscript contains line break and page break information for the engraving process, most of which was transcribed in the first printed edition. Written on the top region of the manuscript is a note written by Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach: “N.B. Der seel. Papa hat auf die Platte diesen Titul stechen lassen, Canon per Augment: in Contrapuncto all octava, er hat es aber wieder ausgestrichen auf der Probe Platte und gesetzet wie forn stehet” (“N.B. The late father had written on the copper plate the following title, Canon per Augment: in Contrapuncto all octava, but had strucken it out again on the proof sheet and restored the title as it was formerly”.)
This is a good point. CPE was off in Berlin and rushed home when his dad
died. He had 3 days to go through all the papers before he had to go
back. But Altnickol might have known what his father-in-law was up to;
he was in Naumberg which isn’t that far from Leipzig.
Also, Anna Magdalena would have known what her husband was up to.
I wonder whether there were some weird family dynamics going on.
Wouldn’t be surprising if CPE alienated everybody.
Oh, that’s interesting. The last part of my message got cut off. It doesn’t show on the website, either. Might have been a weird formatting thing.
It wasn’t very interesting; just a slight improvement in the translation (which I’m guessing was done by a native German speaker): “N. B. My late father had the following title engraved on the plate…”
Also, the preface to Davitt Moroney’s edition says that Bach starting preparing the work for the engraver “the last year or so of his life.” He doesn’t quote a source for this remark. I have a folder somewhere with sources from a class I once had, but my file system, such as it is, refuses to disgorge it.
Sorry Domenico, to your post with points 1. and 2., yes you are missing something. There are different Baroque sources pointing that the different deviations from purity in the different tonalities, were not only inavoidable as Werckmeister stated in order to get purity in the most often used ones, but were also a welcome “expressive” effect per se. German, French and Italian sources.
On the other hand, there is never any hint of anybody in the Baroque era CHANGING the temperament to accommodate for different music.
Edit: not even, AFAIK, moving the wolf in a meantone-tuned instrument.
As for Andrew and Dennis asking for a suggestion, it is obvious that neither of them has ever read my Unequal Temperaments book, where the issue of the temperament required by Bach’s keyboard works is treated in dozens and dozens of pages, scrutinising the different alternatives. I prefer Barnes, and I also show in my book why all the different objections to Barnes are not valid.
Again, I am not going to copy here pages and pages from my books, sorry. We are discussing a matter that has been discussed for decades among specialists. According to a leading one, Prof. Barbieri, there is nothing left to scrutinise anymore on this matter. Have a nice time, fellas, and a happy new year with, hopefully, more fruitful discussions.
Hi Dennis again. You mentioned very knowledgeable Paul Poletti. He is a strong advocate of Neidhardt’s Grosse Stadt and similar temperaments. Indeed, Bach’s music sounds very well using them, but there is a very serious problem. It can be shown that these temperaments cannot be tuned to any reasonable accuracy using the methods in use at the time. There are two basic ways:
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Neidhardt used a monochord, and even the best-calibrated one yields very coarse results on any keyboard instrument. And the matter is pointless anyway because Neidhardt illustrated circular temperaments are a sort of mathematical amusement: in practice ever since his youth he was a strong advocate of Equal Temperament, which however only started gaining ground in German lands not earlier than c.1740. Therefore, strictly following Neidhardt we get a practice that cannot be matched with Bach and his circle, and that yields a very poor tuning anyway.
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Tuning by ear. Tuning temperaments à la Neidhardt, alternating fifths tempered by 1/6th and 1/12th Pyth. comma, is simply not achieavable, to any reasonable accuracy, by the simple sequential aural methods of the Baroque era. The only way (developed very skilfully by Poletti) is to tune some notes so that some intervals are pure or else reach a pitch that is useful for other notes, but then one must go back and retune those notes to their definitive pitch. This practice (further elaborated in my U.T: Book) was unknown in the Baroque era. It was first described by Kirnberger in the 1770s. Therefore we can indeed tune by ear a temperament by Neidhardt accurately, but only if we follow tuning practices of which there is no trace anywyere during Bach’s life . It is, therefore, not an historical reconstruction.
This is fruitful, at least for me. And excuse me but I find unfair, to say the least, to accuse a member of raising unfruitful discussions (let’s skip the fact that in this case the member accused is nobody less than our generous administrator…).
Anyway:
I stand corrected, Claudio, albeit you seem to describe a “welcome side effect” (just like I wrote) more than a looked-for effect. If it was a looked-for effect, wouldn’t violinists or singers be instructed to do the same both in tuning and in intonation? (maybe they were, I don’t know but I don’t remember having read something like that: the strings were a perfect fifth apart, weren’t they). And what about the keyboards with more than 12 notes? of course they could not apply to the Bach era, but still suggest that sometimes the temperament was felt not ideal, hence the addition of the lacking notes.
However, I stand corrected.
What I understand is that every harpsichordist would have one preferred temperament and would use that temperament regardless of the music he was to play, right? This I can understand and if it is what you say, I don’t object. I find it even rational.
Still, would the sources bother to talk about a so rare or unique case like the Goldbergs with one single tonality? We all agree changing between pieces was something they didn’t do (with good reasons), but now we are discussing about one specific single exception, while the sources deal with the general cases. I can’t convince myself the silence of the sources is of any significance in the special case of the Goldbergs.
Dom
Dear Domenico. What irritates me is that the matter of Bach’s temperament, lacking any direct evidence, is very complex and has deserved treatment by many specialists. It is not something we can discuss in a few lines online.
The main scholarly work is based on the WTC. You mention the Goldbergs. Here we have a FURTHER TWO complications!:
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The requirements of the Goldberg variations for modulation into extreme tonalities are significantly, very significantly less than the WTC: here we have G major and g mninor, with few episodes venturing into exotic tonalities. It can be shown, even mathematically, that any temperament that is good sounding for the WTC is also perfect for the Goldbergs. There is no point in trying to find a “better” temperament for them.
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The matter is further complicated because they started playing the Goldbergs after their publication in 1741: by this time the younger generation in German was tuning in Equal temperament, which is therefore historically adequate. Of course, Bach himself is likely to have tuned unequal, which in the Goldbergs, centered on a tonality with just one sharp, arguably produces a better aural effect.
Again, sorry to say, we are discussing for the umpteenth time topics that for many years now have been well-researched, well-published and well-discussed online.
My learned colleagues, how off track we are. We are not discussing ‘best’ temperaments, or Lehman, or theory. I am not trying to ‘prove’ anything. My OP is very simple:
Here I am about to play a concert comprising solely BWV 988. I am at the harpsichord. I have my tuning hammer in hand. What am I going to do? [This is hypothetical right this moment, but may be coming up…]
My take on this is, probably not ET, definitely not Vallotti, Lehman is generally discredited, and so I am left wondering. I am very curious to know what people are using in the context. [I am getting the impression nobody here plays this work as it is too hard! 
judging by the lack of concrete answers. ]
I would imagine that our Kapellmeister would sit down and start with some well tempering and fudge it a bit for G major, and tuners do actually do this sort of thing.
Our list, like all forums, is mostly non-participating members, in the same way our universe may be mostly dark matter. I am sure at least ten percent of our members play this work, at least. I’d love to hear from all. This is your chance to post! 
And a very Happy New Year to all from Melbourne, Australia!
Hi Claudio, I bought your UT book some time ago and filed it away. But I actually read it today! [Lazy sod that I am.] Extremely useful text.
I’d still like to know what people choose, your book notwithstanding.
Dear Dennis, some questions need to be substantiated. I cannot just say: one should do this or that in a complex question. This said, I apologise for my tone: it just reflects the frustration of flogging so much times a dead horse. In this Barbieri agrees with me and indeed refuses to take part in any further temperament discussions. Ibo Ortgies has investigated Bach’s temperament in a different way: instead of my analysis of statistics of intervals in the WTC, he has investigated evidences in documents from Bach’s milieu and indeed re German organ churches. Not a single bit of information about the temperament Bach would have tuned to his keyboards: the exact information is lost to history. But the more general use in Bach’s milieu is certainly not. Werckmeister’s works were very well known.
And I do play the Goldbergs, with Baroque fingerings, and with my Hubbard double: an appropriate instrument, but certainly not the ideal one.
Dear Andrew. My WTC Optimal is a mathematical concoction, showing that if we look for a perfect fit to the WTC (more consonance in the most frequently used thirds), we get a temperament that could not possibly be tuned with the methods in use in the Baroque era. The same criticism can be levelled at Neidhardt’s systems. But not at all at Vallotti and Barnes. Vallotti is indeed the second best temperament for Bach: it is much more historical than “anti-Vallottists” believe (see my article in Harpsichord & fortepiano a couple of years ago), easy to tune to accuracy with Baroque methods, and it can be shown that it is the very best circular temperament in minimising left hand fingering difficulty for violinists playing with the keyboard, because it has the minimum variety between tones and semitones.
Ok so: back to the original question, about a practical-choice/experience-temperament for the Goldberg variations. No need to get all temperamental.
I usually tune all of f-bb-eb-ab-c#-f# pure because I’m lazy, and fiddle with the rest. If I don’t like something, I re-fiddle. Normally what I end up with is equally somewhat tempered fifths/fourths on f-c-g-d-a, plus negotiable e and b, depending on what kind of major thirds I want for c-e and g-b.
The question of the kind of temperament that Var25 “demands” ties obviously in with the discussion about rhetorics and temperament, or about today’s historically-informed insocialized expectations versus would-be actual historical expectation patterns (the contemporaneous versus contemporary thing we could read about upthread, in other words). Instead of coming up with final answers, the most fruitful path forward here seems to me to discuss the value of various scenarios with momentarily accepted variables.
Such as this one: if we want the enharmonics in the second half actually to reach the ears of our audience, namely an audience a) that has heard the piece before, and b) whose ears are accustomed to equal-temperament-supported Lisztian harmonisations, we might choose a temperament that maybe is harsher than the one Bach would have needed to use, in case he wanted to create the same effect in his audience. There’s a lot of ifs and whens built into such a question, but setting it up like this makes one’s decisions traceable. It depends on your guests how much spice you can add to the food.
Le 03/01/2023 09:20, Dennis via The Jackrail écrit :
[Dennis] Dennis https://jackrail.space/u/dennis
January 3Le 03/01/2023 01:23, Andrew Bernard via The Jackrail écrit :
Our list, like all forums, is mostly non-participating members, in the same way our universe may be mostly dark matter. I am sure at least ten percent of our members play this work, at least. I’d love to hear from all. This is your chance to post!I doubt that 10 percent of our members play the Goldbergs. I’m not even
sure that 10% have an appropriate instrument. (I don’t.) That would be
another interesting survey…
I think Douglas is on this list, so I’ll answer for him. He used
Tuning: Jägermeister III (whatever that could be - perhaps a joke of
some kind?)
for his home recording of the Goldbergs on Youtube.
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CPE Bach directions have been scrutinised by specialists. They are an “almost-equal temperament”: he wrote “most fifths tempered” and “the keyboard sounds equally well in all tonalities”: between a typical German “Wohltemperierte” and Equal, CPE is 90% nearest to Equal: actually, the differences are almost inaudible.
But what I also hear in this discussion is the frequent assumption that Bach or Couperin or any composer of choice had one and exactly only one acceptable lifetime temperament and their instruments were always perfectly tuned. In my amateur musical life (as a professional tuner) I have tuned my pianos and harpsichords many ways, and also, depending on time of day or night, schedule and weather changes, tolerated many drifts and “fixes” of tunings.
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