Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 in D Major, BWV 1050

Main page for Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos

• Bach composed this concerto by 1721, when it was included in the set of Six Concerts avec plusieurs Instruments which he sent to the Margrave of Brandenburg.
• This concerto is scored for a concertino (solo group) of flute, violin, and harpsichord, and a ripieno (orchestra) of strings and continuo.¹
• Like the rest of the Brandenburg Concertos, we don’t know exactly when Bach wrote them (his collection of the concertos for the Margrave in 1721 gives us only a terminus ad quem). However, thanks to a full set of parts dated 1720, we know Bach wrote this one by 1720, and that he performed it with the orchestra at the court of Anhalt-Cöthen, where he was Kapellmeister.²
  • Bach visited Berlin during the spring of 1719 to buy a new harpsichord for the court of Anhalt-Cöthen, from a maker named Michael Mietke. Some scholars have suggested that Bach wrote gave the harpsichord an unusually prominent role in this concerto in order to show off the new instrument he had bought.³
• During the Baroque, the harpsichord was generally relegated to a supporting role as part of the continuo, rather than a soloist contrasted with the ripieno. This concerto not only features the harpsichord as a soloist, but also a long and remarkably virtuosic harpsichord cadenza in the first movement. Some scholars see this work as a precursor for the genre of keyboard concerto⁴ (a genre Bach would explore in the 1730s with his Collegium Musicum in Leipzig).⁵

1. Christoph Wolff and Walter Emery, “Bach, Johann Sebastian,” Grove Music Online (2001), Accessed January 6, 2021, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-6002278195. 
2. Christoph Wolff, Bach: The Learned Musician (UK: Oxford University Press, 2002), 200.
3. Christoph Wolff, Bach’s Musical Universe: The Composer and His Work (New York: W.W. Norton, 2020), ebook.
4. Michael Steinberg, The Concerto: A Listener’s Guide (UK: Oxford University Press, 2000), 14.
5. Christoph Wolff, Bach: The Learned Musician (UK: Oxford University Press, 2002), 373.