The Brandenburg Concertos: Bach, Prince Leopold and the Köthen Court

The six works we call the Brandenburg Concertos were never called that by Bach, were probably never played in Brandenburg, and may have sat unused in a margrave’s library for years. Bach wrote out the fair copy in Köthen in 1721, with a dedication in French to Christian Ludwig, Margrave of Brandenburg, and the name stuck only when a nineteenth-century biographer gave it to them. The music itself belongs to the small court at Köthen, where Bach led a small, highly skilled orchestra for a prince who played alongside it. Understanding that court explains why each of the six concertos sounds like no other, and Köthen is a stop on our Bach: The Man, His Music small group tour, with a walking tour of the castle where Bach worked.

A gift to a margrave

Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg-Schwedt, born in Berlin in 1677, was the youngest son of Frederick William, the “Great Elector” of Brandenburg, and a brother of the first King in Prussia. He kept a court orchestra at the City Palace in Berlin. Bach’s dedication, dated 24 March 1721, recalls that the margrave had heard him play some time before and had shown pleasure in his talents. That meeting probably happened in 1719, when Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen sent Bach to Berlin to collect and pay for a new harpsichord for the court.

The dedication is written in French, the language of courtly politeness, and presents the set as Six Concerts avec plusieurs instruments, “Six concertos for several instruments”. Bach asks the margrave not to judge their imperfections too harshly. Dedications like this kept a musician’s name in front of powerful patrons. Bach wrote out the score himself, almost entirely by hand, rather than leaving it to a copyist, which suggests how much care he took over the gift.

Prince Leopold’s orchestra

The music reflects the musicians Bach had at hand. Prince Leopold, who had learned harpsichord and violin on his grand tour, played string instruments himself, especially the viola da gamba. In 1714, after the Prussian king dissolved the royal orchestra in Berlin, Leopold founded a court orchestra at Köthen and hired many of the out-of-work Berlin players. Among them was Christian Ferdinand Abel, a violinist and above all a virtuoso on the viola da gamba. Bach stood godfather to his daughter in 1720, and Abel’s son Carl Friedrich, born in Köthen in 1723, later founded London’s Bach-Abel concerts with Bach’s youngest son.

Bach became Kapellmeister in 1717. The court followed the Reformed faith and needed little elaborate church music, so most of his work was instrumental and secular, for performance by the prince’s musicians and sometimes by the prince himself. The scholar Heinrich Besseler argued that the forces needed for five of the six concertos match the seventeen players Bach had at Köthen. Christoph Wolff, one of today’s leading Bach scholars, disagrees, and doubts that the collection was tailored to any one ensemble. Either way, the variety of the six works only makes sense in a court that had strong players on a wide range of instruments.

Six concertos, six different bands

“Several instruments” is the key phrase in the dedication. Each concerto uses a different combination of instruments, and some combinations were unusual even then. The point is not a technical analysis but the range. Between them, the six read like a survey of what a good court orchestra could do.

The first concerto brings hunting horns, oboes, bassoon and a small, high-tuned violin called the violino piccolo together with the strings; it is the only one in four movements. The second sets four very different soloists side by side: a high trumpet, a recorder, an oboe and a violin. The third does without soloists altogether, using three violins, three violas and three cellos in constantly shifting groups. The fourth pairs a solo violin with two recorders. The fifth gives a flute, a violin and, most strikingly, the harpsichord the solo roles. The sixth leaves out violins entirely, giving the music to two violas, two violas da gamba, a cello and a bass, a dark, warm sound that suits a court where the prince himself played the gamba.

Older music in new clothes

The set was compiled rather than written from scratch. An early version of the first concerto, without its third movement and closing polonaise, appears to date from Bach’s years at Weimar and was probably used to open a secular cantata of 1713. An earlier version of the fifth exists from around 1720 and 1721, and scholars have reconstructed a lost chamber version of the second. Our overview of Bach’s Germany follows him from that Weimar court to Köthen and on to Leipzig.

Compiling a set from the best of what he had was entirely normal for the time, and it says something about the purpose of the gift. Bach chose the pieces that showed off the widest range of colour and invention, revised them, and copied them out in a single fair score. The set read, in effect, as a portfolio.

The harpsichord takes the stage

The fifth concerto is the most famous for good reason. The harpsichord, normally a supporting continuo instrument, gradually takes over the first movement and ends in a long solo cadenza, one of the earliest examples of the keyboard as a concerto soloist. Many scholars think the part was written for the new harpsichord by the Berlin builder Michael Mietke, the instrument Bach collected for Leopold in 1719. The court’s investment in that instrument, and Bach’s evident delight in it, belongs to the same Köthen keyboard world that produced the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier, described in our article on The Well-Tempered Clavier and Köthen.

A court that travelled

Leopold’s musicians did not only play at home. The prince took members of his orchestra with him to the fashionable Bohemian spa of Carlsbad, where the nobility of central Europe gathered each summer to take the waters and be entertained. The margrave visited Leopold’s court there in 1718, which may have been the first time he heard Bach. It was also on a Carlsbad journey, in the summer of 1720, that Bach was away when his first wife, Maria Barbara, died suddenly at home in Köthen. She had been buried by the time he returned. The concertos’ polish and variety suit a court that performed for discerning, well-travelled listeners, not just for its own household.

What the instruments sounded like in 1721

The colours Bach was working with were not the ones a modern orchestra produces. His horns and trumpets had no valves. Players changed notes with their lips alone, which in the high register, where the second concerto’s trumpet part lies, called for rare skill and gave the sound a bright, ringing edge. The recorders of the second and fourth concertos are quiet, sweet-toned instruments, easily covered by strings, so Bach scores carefully around them. The flute of the fifth concerto was a wooden transverse flute, softer than its modern metal descendant. Strings were strung with gut, which gives a lighter, more speaking tone.

Since the 1960s and 1970s, many ensembles have returned to instruments of this kind, and performances on them reveal balances that can be lost on modern instruments, the recorders and the gambas especially. Both approaches have devoted listeners, and comparing the same concerto played both ways is one of the best ways to understand what Bach heard at Köthen.

Were the concertos ever played in Berlin?

Nobody knows, and there is no evidence that they were. A long-repeated story holds that the margrave’s musicians found them too difficult and that the score sat unused until his death in 1734. The concertos are not named in the inventory of his library made after his death, which adds to the mystery. Not every scholar accepts the story. Malcolm Boyd thought it unlikely that Bach would send six concertos his recipient’s musicians could not play, and parts may have been copied from the score without surviving. What is certain is that the score itself was kept rather than discarded, which is why it survives.

Lost and found

The dedication score’s next known owner was Johann Philipp Kirnberger, a former pupil of Bach, who left it to Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia, sister of Frederick the Great. She in turn left her music library to Berlin’s Joachimsthal Gymnasium, and in 1914 it reached the Royal Library in Berlin. In 1849 the music scholar Siegfried Dehn found the set in Princess Amalia’s collection, and it was first published in 1850, the centenary of Bach’s death. The name “Brandenburg Concertos” came later still, from the biographer Philipp Spitta.

From Köthen to the Prussian court

The concertos tie Bach to the Hohenzollern family, a link that ran through his life. The margrave was a great-uncle of Frederick the Great. In 1747 the aging Bach travelled to Frederick’s court at Potsdam, where his son Carl Philipp Emanuel was court harpsichordist, and improvised for the king on a theme Frederick gave him. The result was the Musical Offering, the subject of our article on Bach’s Potsdam encounter with Frederick the Great. Princess Anna Amalia, whose library preserved the Brandenburg score, was the king’s sister. On the tour, Potsdam comes on the third day and Köthen on the thirteenth, so the two ends of this connection bracket the journey.

Why are they called the Brandenburg Concertos?

Because of the dedication, not the music. Bach called them simply six concertos for several instruments. Bach’s nineteenth-century biographer Philipp Spitta named them after the Margrave of Brandenburg, to whom Bach sent the set in 1721, and the title has been used ever since. There is no evidence that any of the music was written with Brandenburg in mind. Most of it had probably been played in Köthen, and some of it in Weimar, before the dedication was written.

How long are the Brandenburg Concertos?

Each lasts between about ten and twenty minutes, and the complete set takes roughly an hour and a half, depending on the performers’ tempos. Most are in three movements, fast, slow and fast, following the Italian concerto pattern; the first adds a set of courtly dances at the end. Because each concerto uses a different group of players, performing all six in one concert means reshaping the ensemble almost every time, which is why complete performances are special occasions.

Can you hear Bach’s music in Köthen today?

Yes, especially in festival years. Köthen Castle’s late-classicist Hall of Mirrors hosts the town’s Bach festival days, held every two years, and the castle’s former riding hall was rebuilt as a concert hall in 2008. The castle also hosts a festival named after the Abel family, first held in 2023. On the tour, the Köthen visit is a guided walking tour of the town, the castle and the church of St Agnus, on a long travel day from Weimar that ends in Halberstadt; the six concerts included in the tour are elsewhere on the route, mostly during Leipzig’s Bachfest.

What is there to see in Köthen?

The castle, which houses the town’s Historical Museum and Bach Memorial in its Ludwigsbau wing, and the Lutheran church of St Agnus. The Bach exhibition, on the first floor in the former apartments of the princesses, covers the court, the town and the Bach family in Bach’s time, his Köthen music, and Prince Leopold’s patronage of the arts, with an audio guide in English. At St Agnus, Bach received Communion from a chalice that is still in use, and the church holds a Last Supper painted by Lucas Cranach the Younger in 1565.

The court that made the music

The Brandenburg Concertos show the conditions under which Bach was freest as an instrumental composer. A prince who played, an orchestra of skilled players recruited from Berlin, and a Calvinist court with little call for church music gave him six years to explore what instruments could do together. The dedication to a margrave in Berlin was a fine copy and a hopeful gesture, but the sound of the music was made in Köthen.

Leopold married in December 1721, the court’s spending on music shrank, and in 1723 Bach left for Leipzig. He would spend the rest of his life writing mostly for choirs and church services. Seen in that light, the Brandenburg Concertos are a farewell to the one period in his career when the orchestra, not the church, came first.