J.S. Bach’s Cello Prelude for Classical Guitar

Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 (BWV 1007) opens with a Prelude that has become one of the most recognized pieces ever written for solo strings. It has scored films; it has been played at funerals and weddings; and it has become a central piece in the classical guitar repertoire. But it was never written for the guitar.

In fact, Bach wrote this prelude for cello. He composed it between 1717 and 1723, while serving as Kapellmeister at the court of Köthen. Thus, it is very important to keep in mind the original setting of the music when we bring it to the guitar. We’ll discuss some of those challenges below, but let’s start with some background.

Want to learn more about Bach’s Cello Suites? Learn directly from a cellist in our podcast interview with cellist Jacques Lee Wood

How the Suites survived

No autograph manuscript of the cello suites survives. The fullest early source is a handwritten copy by Bach’s second wife, Anna Magdalena. She titled it Suites à Violoncello Solo senza Basso. Her copy carries no bowings, no phrasing, no indication of how Bach wanted the pieces shaped. Without that guidance, cellists and scholars spent over a century treating the suites as technical studies. They were raw material for the hands, not repertoire with an established way to play it. Thus, the prelude was left off concert programs during this time.

That changed with Pablo Casals. He found a battered edition in a Barcelona secondhand shop in 1889, at age thirteen. He spent the next decade learning to play the suites as concert music. His recordings were the first complete recordings of all six suites. He made them at Abbey Road and in Paris, between 1936 and 1939. They’re largely responsible for the place these pieces hold in the repertoire today, cello or otherwise.

Arranging Bach for guitar

Any guitarist working from this Prelude inherits a set of decisions. The cello can only sound one note at a time, with occasional brief chords. Whereas the guitar can sustain multiple moving lines. Editors and arrangers must decide which implied harmonies to fill in. They decide whether to move bass notes up or down an octave, and how far to depart from the original.

There’s precedent for that kind of liberty. Bach transcribed his own Cello Suite No.5 (BWV 1011) for solo lute  (BWV 995). He changed the key and altered the voicing to fit the new instrument. And this transcription tells us a lot about the kinds of choices Bach would make to bring music written for an instrument like cello to a more polyphonic one like the lute.

On guitar, those choices show up clearly in the final chord. While the cello ends on three notes, many guitar editions add three more beneath them, with a much fuller resonance.

Our podcast interview with Frank Koonce about Bach and the guitar provides some great additional insight into bringing Bach’s music to our instrument

And check out our post on J.S. Bach on the Guitar to learn even more and listen to some great performances of Bach’s music on guitar from Simon

The form of an improvisation

A Baroque dance suite is a set of stylized dances. Think allemande, courante, sarabande, a pair of minuets or bourrées, and a gigue. Each of those dances is cast in binary form, or two repeated halves. But a prelude introduces the suite. The genre grew out of a real performance practice. A lutenist or keyboard player would improvise a free introduction before the formal dances began.

Bach himself was known in his own lifetime chiefly as an organist. And he was quite well known for improvising at the keyboard. While this Prelude is fully written out, not improvised on the spot, it does keep the free, exploratory character of that older performance practice.

This is why the score looks like an unbroken run of sixteenth notes for close to three minutes. Nothing marks where one idea ends and another begins.

Except the harmony, that is. Underneath this flurry of sixteenth notes, the harmony moves at close to one chord per measure for most of the piece. And if you strip away all of the arpeggiation and reduce the piece to its basic harmonic structure, what’s left resembles a chorale. The chorale is the harmonic language Bach used for the church, reduced here to a single instrument with no words at all.

The pillars that build the whole piece

The clearest harmonic landmarks arrive in three blocks of four measures. You’ll find them at measures 1-4, measures 15-19, and measures 25-28. The third block is the most disguised; it repeats the opening progression, transposed up a fifth. Those three blocks, plus the closing four measures, are the pillars the rest of the material hangs from.

Between the second and third pillar, Bach does something remarkable. From measure 23 onward, the bass holds the dominant note for nineteen measures straight. The tonic chord flickers past for a single beat at measure 19, then vanishes. Full resolution doesn’t arrive until the very last measure of the piece. That long drone makes the music almost feel like it’s holding its breath. More importantly, it makes the the final chord feel like a real arrival, which is quite satisfying from a listening perspective.

Where the difficulty lives

None of this is easy to bring off on classical guitar. Bach wrote a single melodic line that implies three separate voices. A guitarist has to decide, phrase by phrase, how to finger each passage. One option basically sticks to the original, favoring the melodic line and the polyphony that line implies. The other lets adjacent notes ring together, favoring both the harmony and the polyphony. Both choices are legitimate. They produce different music. The same four bars can sound like two different pieces, depending on which choice a guitarist makes.

Slurs carry real interpretive weight too. They stand in for the connected bow strokes Bach wrote into the cello part. The guitar has no direct equivalent. Handled carelessly, a slur can sound accented and interrupt the line. But a well-executed set of slurs recreates something close to the cello’s legato. That’s especially true across a barre, or while other fingers hold a chord shape.

The chromatic run near the end of the piece raises a separate problem: string crossing and repeating fingers. (The same is true of scale passages elsewhere.) String crossings in the right hand are easy to overlook, but planning out fingerings and being intentional will help make them smoother.

Underneath all of these technical challenges is a musical challenge: to keep a steady pulse. While the phrasing in Bach’s music is often irregular, too much rubato can break down some of the forward motion of the line. Thus, a steady pulse is very important.

Enjoy this music on the guitar

We are quite lucky to be able to play this glorious music on our instrument! While it has its challenges—both technical and musical—those challenges are certainly worth the effort. We hope you enjoy giving your time to this music, which is timeless.

Maybe you’re not quite ready for this Cello Prelude just yet…check out our arrangement of Air on the G String, which you can download for free

And if you’d like to learn this music, Simon has a more than one hour lesson on the Prelude at CGC Academy. Join today!