CHASE

MS part: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département de la Musique, Vma.ms.1064

MS dates 1833 or 1835 (Month field is placeholder)

All parts: musical text in ink (including fingerings and articulation in ink) by Bernhard Molique.

Solo violin part: performance annotations in normal pencil (and possibly blue pencil, too) by Pierre Baillot.

Pierre Baillot was among the first violinists in Paris to champion older repertory. In 1832, he participated in Fétis’s famous concert historique, and in 1833 and 1837 he organised dedicated historical soirées at his own home. Ferdinand Hiller was an active promoter of Bach’s music. On 15 December 1833, he played with Chopin and Liszt the first movement of Bach Triple Concerto BWV 1063 at the Paris Conservatoire, and in 1835 he played with Baillot two accompanied violin sonatas by Bach.

The pencil annotations in the Violino Principale part are surely in Baillot’s hand. The characteristic features of his handwriting can be observed throughout his annotated parts preserved today between the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris and the private collection of Daniel Lainé. Many of these parts were signed by Baillot, as it is the case here. In the top-right corner of the first page of the Violino Principale, Baillot has added his distinguishing shortened signature, with three horizontal dashes standing for ‘Pierre Marie François’ and ‘B’ for Baillot:

- - - B

For the first finger of the left hand Baillot always uses the Roman numeral ‘I’ instead of the Arabic number ‘1’. In his handwriting, the number ‘2’ has a distinguishing shape (with a little inflection at the bottom). The use of ‘loco’ is typical of Baillot, always meaning ‘go back to first position’. Baillot’s indications for up- and down-bow are placed upside down compared to today’s norm, resembling rather the actual shape of head and frog of the bow. For this piece, Baillot has added metronome markings (at the start of each movement) and duration, in minutes (at the end of each movement). The handwritten annotations (most indicating nuances of tone and phrasing) are concentrated in Baillot’s part of Violino Principale. On Baillot’s approach to the musical text in performance, see Fabio Morabito, ‘Theatrical Marginalia: Pierre Baillot and the Prototype of the Modern Performer’ Music & Letters 101/2 (2020), https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/gcz110.

It is difficult to know which sources Molique used to prepare this manuscript. I have included a version of the PDF with comments and coloured shapes, highlighting some differences between Bach’s original, Molique’s choices of phrasing, articulation and fingerings, as well as Baillot’s attitude in implementing or replacing them.

Throughout their surviving library of performance materials, marginalia by Baillot and his colleagues seem not to have been produced as a finite set of instructions (i.e., as if they were meant to be followed by someone else); they should be considered rather fragmentary traces of their own rehearsals and performances. 

[Fabio Morabito]

Bibliography:

Katharine Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 14-15. 

Joël-Marie Fauquet, Les sociétés de musique de chambre à Paris de la Restauration à 1870 (Paris: Aux amateurs de livres, 1986), 57-58.

Joël-Marie Fauquet and Antoine Hennion, La grandeur de Bach: l’amour de la musique en France au XIXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2000), 65.

Fabio Morabito, ‘The Score in the Performer’s Hands: Reading Traces of the Act of Performance as a Form of Analysis?’ Music Theory Online 22/2 (2016), http://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.16.22.2/mto.16.22.2.morabito.html

Fabio Morabito, ’ Music & Letters 101/2 (2020), https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/gcz110.