What is the Rumor?

There is a long-standing rumor that Johann Sebastian Bach’s Six Trio Sonatas (BWV 525–530) were originally written for pedal clavichord and not for the organ. This rumor was kept alive in, among other places, the first two editions of the Schmieder Catalog of Bach’s Works (BWV):

The idea that the Six Trio Sonatas were “written for pedal clavichord or pedal harpsichord in the first place” has been removed from the current edition. The first question to ask is, “Where did this idea come from?” And the logical answer is to begin with the literature list that Schmieder himself provides. The 1966 literature list has nothing that was published after 1937, because the pre-publication material was destroyed during the Second World War and it took Wolfgang Schmieder (1901– 1990) many years to reconstruct the work.

The reception history in this chapter begins with the nineteenth-century German response to the rumor, preserved in the sources recorded by Schmieder, namely: Johann Forkel, Philipp Spitta, and Albert Schweitzer. This response is more complex than reported by later scholars. The English reaction to the rumor was influenced by the early twentieth-century revival of the clavichord in a nonhistorical form. The modern response is marked by a concerted effort to remove the idea of the pedal clavichord altogether.

The Rumor at the End of the Eighteenth Century

Johann Nikolaus Forkel (1749–1818)

Johann Nikolaus Forkel’s large essay on the life of Johann Sebastian Bach is based in part on correspondence directly with Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. It is the first extensive biography of Bach from the first real music historian in German. A professor at Göttingen University, and an organist himself, Forkel published his essay in 1802 and it first appeared in English in 1820.