J. S. Bach, The Six French Suites

Excerpt from the CD booklet essay by Trevor Stephenson:

Even for the hard-working Bach, the years from 1720–25 were extremely busy and filled with transition. In July of 1720, while he was away on a tour with other musicians employed by the Cöthen court, Bach’s first wife, Maria Barbara, died quite unexpectedly. Bereaved, and with four children to care for, he was also soon faced with increasing uneasiness over the security of his employment as Kapellmeister at the Cöthen court, where enthusiasm for the music program and funding for his position may have been drying up. By the time of his remarriage, in December of 1721, to Anna Magdalena (he was thirty-six and she was twenty), Bach had begun to seek employment elsewhere. In the Spring of 1723, after a thorough audition (Probe) at the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, Bach and the whole family—including Aunt Friedelena Margaretha, older sister of Maria Barbara, and now resident nanny—moved to Leipzig, where he would work as Kantor for the final twenty-seven years of his life. At Leipzig Bach’s duties included coordinating music for the city’s four main churches, and, upon his arrival, he undertook the monumental task of composing several annual cycles (Jahrgänge) of music for the Lutheran church year. In just four years, this amounted to several hundred cantatas of astonishing variety and spiritual depth—a feat of unparalleled musical creativity. Also, between 1722 and 1725, Anna Magdalena bore three children—and ten more would come before 1743.

In the midst of all this, Bach continued to write large and small scale works on the side! In 1722, as he completed the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier, drafts for several new dance suites appeared in the notebook (Clavierbüchlein) that he presented as a gift to his new wife, Anna Magdalena. Bach continued to rework and expand the dance sets over the next three years, and by 1725 six complete suites (known today as the “French Suites”) had crystallized into a nearly final form. Like most of Bach’s music, these suites were never published. Instead, he used them regularly as a teaching aid for students who had completed study of the Inventions but were not yet ready for The Well-Tempered Clavier.