A Musical Offering, BWV 1079

• Bach’s Musikalisches Opfer (Musical Offering) BWV 1079 was composed in 1747.¹
• Bach was invited to visit King Frederick the Great of Prussia in May 1747. He improvised a fugue at the piano (this is one time we know Bach played a piano!) on a theme given by the king. He later composed The Musical Offering, a multimovement collection based on the king’s theme, and dedicated it to Frederick the Great.²
  • Bach’s son, C.P.E. Bach, had been part of Frederick’s musical establishment since 1740.
• The Musical Offering includes various treatments of the king’s theme, ranging from simple statements to mathematically complex puzzle canons. ³

Ricercar à 6

• Genre: Ricercar (this is the polyphonic type): 16^th-17^th C. instrumental composition featuring scholarly contrapuntal techniques; precursor of fugue. Ricercar was an old-fashioned genre in Bach’s time.⁴
• “à 6” indicates that the movement was written for six independent polyphonic voices.

1. Christoph Wolff and Walter Emery, “Bach, Johann Sebastian,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed July 15, 2019, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-6002278195.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Harvard Dictionary of Music, 4^th ed., s.v. “Ricercar” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003).