Although Bach is rightly known as the Cantor of St. Thomas's in Leipzig, it should not be forgotten that his tenure there (1723-50) comprised the last period of his career, one in which his primary responsibility was to provide music for the church. Prior to Leipzig were his early years in Weimar (1708-17) and a middle period spent at Cöthen (1717-23). The Cöthen years proved especially significant and gave birth to such celebrated masterpieces as Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier, the Brandenburg Concertos and the Sonatas and Partitas for unaccompanied violin. This focus on instrumental music grew from the conditions of Bach's employment by Prince Leopold, who adhered to a "reformed" church in which music had little place. It was a period important not only in terms of what Bach composed but also for the ways in which it allowed him to develop as an artist, thus affecting his later output at Leipzig. Indeed, some of his Cöthen music ultimately found its way into the sacred Leipzig works, the Prelude of the Violin Partita in E, for example, being reworked as the grand sinfonia for trumpet and orchestra that opens the Cantata, BWV 29. An often-repeated notion is that Bach, rather than initiating a new musical era, closed an old one. As a generalization this may be true, but it remains a misleading oversimplification. More specifically, Bach, like any great artist, honored the traditions of his time while building upon them. Nothing illustrates this better than his works for solo violin. Consider, for example, the three sonatas. In many respects they typify the sonata da chiesa—a four-movement work having a slow-fast-slow-fast pattern of tempos. But the initial fast movements of each work are richly developed fugues extending the technical and musical potential of the violin far beyond what Bach's predecessors or contemporaries achieved. Or consider the partitas or suites. In Bach's time the suite had become as familiar a genre as the symphony was to be a century later—specifically a group of dances each having its own character but linked together by shared tonality and binary form. In effect, the suite comprised a series of contrasted styles, which the audience of Bach's day readily recognized. Employing those familiar styles in the partitas, Bach built movements having exceptional melodic and polyphonic richness, extraordinary brilliance, and an occasional extension of conventional dance form in which variations (doubles) on thematic material are added. And in the Partita in D Minor Bach was especially bold, concluding with the famous Chaconne, a movement as long as the four that precede it and one having ground-breaking complexity and richness in its series of variations over a reiterated bass. As is true for most of his instrumental output, the purpose of these violin works (intended for highly competent amateurs) was to delight and instruct. And so they did. As one violinist of the period put it, "There is nothing better for anyone eager to learn than [Bach's] violin solos without bass." Bach himself, like Mozart and Beethoven, was an accomplished string player, serving as violinist and violist in the orchestras at Cothen and Leipzig. It is thus not surprising that these sonatas and partitas, for all their complexity and virtuosic demands, lie extremely well for the instrument. With the many musicological revelations of the last half of the 20th century, we have clues to how these works should be performed. In the 19th century this music was often completely misunderstood. Mendelssohn and Schumann, for example, believed it required keyboard accompaniment. And the famed violinist Ferdinand David prepared his own edition filled with wrong notes and ill-conceived notions about phrasing. And later, Heifetz's teacher, Leopold Auer, brought out another edition encrusted with 19th-century notions of interpretation. In recent years what has emerged are guidelines for performing these works. For one thing, Bach's manuscripts have been published in facsimile, revealing that he had clear notions about phrasing and nuance. Then too, many Baroque conventions, unknown or ignored a century ago, have now become standard practice or at least key guides to interpretation. These involve such basic pragmatic matters as the playing of appoggiaturas on the beat (rather than as unaccented grace notes), extending the length of dotted notes and keeping vibrato to an absolute minimum. Then there are matters of style-consciousness. We now know from the writing of such contemporary theorists as Johann Mattheson (1681-1764) that the dances of the suite were meant to suggest specific "affects. " A sarabande was considered "honorable and dignified," a gavotte "joyful and jubilant." Similarly, tempo indications and tonality carried an implicit ethos. Mattheson calls B minor "bizarre and melancholy," C major "impertinent but joyful" and A minor "dignified and plaintive." And he labels adagio "sorrowful," andante "hopeful" and allegro "comforting." One may question, to be sure, how literally such ascriptions were meant. Mattheson himself noted that they should be taken more as suggestions than as inviolate dictums. Most significantly this "affective" view of music makes clear the distinction between the composer of the early 18th century and his 19th-century counterpart. Whereas a Chopin or Brahms was thought to be expressing personal feeling, a Bach or Handel was simply expressing a feeling—joy, sadness, etc.— that was not taken to be personal. In short, the Baroque composer was not the confessional artist. Rather, he strove to please and move his audience by suggesting a variety of moods. When Jascha Heifetz made these recordings, few if any major instrumentalists took such historical performance traditions into account. Viewed in this context, his recordings are in some respects a reaction against the encrustations of Romantic tradition that veiled Baroque style. A case in point is his tone. Bach's violin— with its short fingerboard, lack of inner bracing and relatively low tension of its gut strings—was incapable of the full sonority that the modern technically modified instrument can produce. And lacking a chin rest, it was held in a position that prevented a rich vibrato. Either through awareness of this or simply from apt instincts, Heifetz, in these performances, maintains a leaner, purer tone than that which he favored for the Tchaikovsky or Brahms concertos. Then too he grasps the implicit emotional contrasts between movements, faster ones executed with pointed élan, slower ones with a breadth that never cloys or becomes sentimental. Obviously it would be foolish to claim that these are stylized readings in every detail. Appoggiaturas, for instance, are played as before-the-beat decorations, altering slightly the melodic line as Bach conceived it. Still, from a violinist whose training was rooted in 19th-century tradition, these performances stand as one of many examples of the way in which Heifetz was a transcendent artist, not only in his technical brilliance but in his intuitive grasp of style as well. —Mortimer H. Frank Contributing Editor, Fanfare. Stereophile