Johann Kuhnau is one of those composers whose name is distinctly familiar to keyboardists despite the fact that few of us actually play much, if any of his music. As students, we perhaps encountered the odd dance movement of his alongside miniatures from the Notenbüchlein für Anna Magdalena Bach in anthologies of baroque keyboard music (such as those published by the Associated Boards of the Royal Schools of Music), and every so often Kuhnau's name appears in concert programme texts or CD liner notes, usually mentioned in his capacity as the Kapellmeister who immediately preceded J. S. Bach at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig. But it is precisely in such roles, invariably overshadowed by his peerless successor, that we have come to know Kuhnau. The appearance of Henle's new edition of Kuhnau's complete works for keyboard therefore presents a rare opportunity to find the composer not relegated to the sidelines, but for once placed squarely in the limelight.
Before delving into the particulars of this new edition, it is worth mentioning that these works are no strangers to the printing press; indeed, Kuhnau's keyboard music played an important role in establishing a market for keyboard publications intended for domestic consumption. At a time when most keyboardists transmitted and circulated their works exclusively through manuscript copies, Kuhnau published no fewer than four collections of his works for keyboard. The first part of the Neuer Clavier Übung (new clavier practice) was published in 1689 and consists of seven ‘partitas’ (or dance suites) in major keys; the second part was published in 1692 and consists of seven more partitas in minor keys along with a Sonata in B flat major, which Kuhnau introduces as the first of its kind. These publications were immensely popular, as reflected by the multiple subsequent print runs that were produced – the last imprints of the two volumes appeared a few years after Kuhnau's death, in 1725 and 1726 respectively – and the fact that later keyboardists (notably Johann Krieger, Christoph Graupner and of course J. S. Bach) echoed Kuhnau by using Clavier-Übung as the title for their own published collections.
Encouraged by the success of his earlier endeavours and of his experimental Sonata in B flat major in particular, Kuhnau published a volume of seven new sonatas entitled Frische Clavier Früchte in 1696, claiming that he had composed the cycle in a week-long frenzy, completing one sonata per day. Although a small number of German keyboard sonatas are known from manuscript sources that predate Kuhnau's publications, there is little question that he was largely responsible for laying the groundwork for the great tradition of German keyboard sonatas that burgeoned in the eighteenth century. As with the partitas of the Clavier Übung, these sonatas draw upon both French and Italian keyboard idioms (in addition to native German ones), but they also feature textures that are patently instrumental – sometimes even orchestral – in character; one can easily divine the hallmarks of trio sonatas or concerti grossi, for instance, lurking behind many of the movements. Kuhnau's final keyboard publication, the Musicalische Vorstellung Einiger Biblischer Historien (commonly known in English as the Biblical Sonatas), appeared in 1700. Despite the fact that it is the keyboard publication for which Kuhnau is probably best remembered today, it is also the most uncharacteristic of the lot. Each of the six sonatas in the collection is a musical allegory of a biblical scene, and is accompanied by a programmatic text that explains the narrative. Formally speaking, there is little about these sonatas that relates to those of the Frische Clavier Früchte; brimming with musical imagery and theatrical affect, the pieces are, in many ways, more akin to the Empfindsamkeit writing of C. P. E. Bach and his generation than to the works of other turn-of-the-century keyboardists.
As in the case of the Clavier Übung, these publications appear to have been a commercial success and were reprinted several times. In all four cases, however, is difficult to speak of distinct ‘editions’ in the modern sense; some publication runs appear to have produced new pages with corrections and alterations that were then mixed and matched inconsistently with surplus pages from earlier printings. Thus two seemingly identical exemplars of a given work bearing the same publication date can actually contain a fair amount of textual discrepancy, making the establishment of a Fassung letzter Hand problematic. This issue was first tackled by Carl Päsler in the first ‘modern’ edition of Kuhnau's keyboard works, which appeared as volume 4 of the first series of Denkmäler deutscher Tonkunst in 1901. Päsler's editorial work is, on the whole, commendable, and although selected works were published in anthologies by Schott, Peters and others, his edition served as the uncontested musical text for Kuhnau's keyboard music throughout the twentieth century. It was not until the Broude Trust published Kuhnau: The Collected Works for Keyboard, edited by David Harris, as part of their ‘Art of the Keyboard’ series in 2003, that a new scholarly text of Kuhnau's four collections became available.
From a strictly musicological standpoint, then, Henle's new edition is perhaps more redundant than it is ground-breaking in terms of providing an authoritative musical text – particularly in the wake of the Broude edition. And yet, it is also of tremendous significance, for never before has a major household-name imprint such as Henle (pace Broude) published a complete edition of Kuhnau's keyboard music, let alone an urtext edition intended for practical use by performers rather than a monumental edition destined to languish in the library stacks (such as Päsler's). Although much indebted to Harris and Päsler before him, Norbert Müllemann – better known as an editor of nineteenth-century music, and the music of Chopin in particular – has produced an exemplary volume that meets the highest standards of editorial scholarship. In addition to the complete contents of Kuhnau's two-volume Clavier Übung, the Frische Clavier Früchte and the Biblical Sonatas, Müllemann has also included an appendix containing four pieces transmitted only in manuscript copies: a toccata, two praeludia and a fugue. Thus this Henle volume really does represent the complete (surviving) keyboard works of Kuhnau.
Müllemann's excellent introductory essay, presented in German, English and French, provides a concise biographical sketch of Kuhnau, and an overview of each of the four published collections and the works transmitted in manuscript. As for the prefaces to the original publications, newly typeset PDFs of Kuhnau's texts are freely available for download from Henle's website. While this is a highly pragmatic move that saves paper and makes these texts more readily accessible, even to those who do not purchase the edition, it is a pity that Henle did not go the extra mile and include these texts along with translations in the printed volume itself. The back of the edition features a comprehensive critical commentary, which sets forth the editorial principles, provides an overview of each of the sources and catalogues every editorial deviation from the principal source used in the case of each collection. The back matter also contains an essay on performance practice and an English translation of Kuhnau's (German) programmatic texts that accompany the Biblical Sonatas and are presented alongside the music earlier in the volume. No French translation is provided for any of the back matter, however, which is a bit strange given the presence of a French Introduction.
A few other (admittedly minor) shortcomings can also be found: Clavier is repeatedly translated as ‘piano’ in the English Introduction, but is left (more appropriately) untranslated as ‘clavier’ in the French text. In this day and age, Henle really ought to know better and speak of ‘claviers’ or ‘keyboard instruments’ when dealing with repertoire from this period. An even more minor point, though one I feel compelled to mention, is the fallacious use of an equals sign in the place of the historical double oblique hyphen (Doppelbindestrich) of old German orthography in the typesetting of Kuhnau's German texts; ‘Wort=Trennung’ instead of ‘Wort⸗Trennung’, for example. There is no reason why any respectable publisher (let alone a German one) should resort to such a typewriter-style hack in the age of digital typography. Finally, there is at least one blatant editorial error: on page 73, bar 61, the two right-hand quaver c1s on beat two should be e1s – probably the result of a slip when transcribing from soprano to treble clef.
But these are negligible, nit-picking quibbles. All things considered, there is no question that this is an invaluable edition, one that is long overdue from a major publishing house and for a reasonable price. Let us hope that with time Kuhnau's keyboard music will find a niche beyond student anthologies and oblique references in the shadow of J. S. Bach. His music is certainly worthy of greater attention, and with any luck this new edition will help it receive its due.
