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Excerpts from Harold Shonberg's The Great Pianists
BACH'S CLAVIER TECHNIQUE • 21
…famous visit to Potsdam. (Henry Fowler Broadwood, the English piano manufacturer, saw them at Potsdam as late as 1850, "but in very bad repair.") The King was waiting for Bach when he arrived in the evening and immediately hustled him to the pianos, without even giving him time to change his traveling dress. He gave Bach a theme upon which to improvise. This Bach did so well "that not only His Majesty was pleased to show his satisfaction thereat, but also all those present were seized with astonishment." Presumably one of the people seized by astonishment was Bach's son Carl Philipp Emanuel, who was Frederick's accompanist for some twenty years.
But Johann Sebastian was not a pianist. He was a master of the clavichord and harpsichord, and he undoubtedly played the Silbermann pianos with a harpsichord touch. Admittedly Silbermann's instruments in 1747 were a long way from the instrument we know today, being light in action and feeble in carrying power. But they did have a wider dynamic variety than anything known up to then, and Bach was not the man to take full advantage of their potentialities. Bach's clavier style was, of course, based on the instruments he had studied as a youth. He played with bent fingers, directly over the keys. According to Bach's first biographer, Johann Nicolaus Forkel, "Bach is said to have played with so easy and so small a motion of the fingers that it was hardly perceptible. Only the first joints of the fingers were in motion; the hand retained, even in the most difficult passages, its rounded form; the fingers rose very little from the keys, hardly more than in a trill, and when one was employed the others remained quietly in position." This quietness extended to his position at the clavier. "Still less did the other parts of his body take any share in his playing, as happens with many whose hand is not light enough." As one could guess by looking at his keyboard music, Bach's own playing must have featured complete independence of hand and finger. This is corroborated by Forkel. "He rendered all his fingers, of both hands, equally strong and serviceable, so that he was able to execute not only chords and all running passages, but also single and double trills with equal ease and delicacy." Obviously he was a complete master on the instruments he had grown up with, and, of course, we can imagine his general musicianship. He once said to a friend that he believed he could play at sight anything ever written. But the piano came too late in his life —and also in the lives of Handel and Scarlatti.
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