Cello Suite No. 1, Prelude

Bach wrote the six suites for unaccompanied cello at Köthen, most likely between 1717 and 1723, and no manuscript in his hand has ever been found. What the world reads instead is the copy his second wife, Anna Magdalena, made: the notes and the bar lines, with almost no bowings and no dynamics. Every edition since is somebody's argument about what she left out. The prelude of the first suite is the best known movement of all six by a wide margin, and the one most likely to turn up in a film or an advertisement.

For a long time nobody played them whole. They were treated as exercises, the sort of thing a student worked through rather than a program a hall would sit for. Pablo Casals found a worn edition in a Barcelona shop as a boy of thirteen, and spent a dozen years on them before he would play one in public. He did not record the set until 1936, when he was nearly sixty, and finished in 1939. Those recordings are why the suites are repertoire now, and the Library of Congress added them to the National Recording Registry in the class of 2018.

There is no tune in this prelude, which is exactly why it teaches so well. It is a chain of arpeggios, most of them stated twice in a bar, moving through a chord progression: G, then C, then the dominant seventh, then home, and off again through E minor and A7 to D. A guitarist, a banjo player and a mandolin player have all tabbed it for the same reason, and it is the most tabbed piece of classical music there is for fretted instruments. What you are practicing is the right hand, over a chord chart that happens to be by Bach.

Written an octave above the cello, Bach's bottom note is the mandolin's open G course, so the drone under the first four bars is a string you never fret. The whole 42 bars are here, and they stay in first position from end to end: the highest note is the G two octaves above that open course, and nothing reaches past the sixth fret. Eighteen low bass notes sit under the open G even at this octave, so they are lifted an octave, which is what every fretted arrangement of this prelude does. Play it slowly with strict alternate picking and let the repeated note in each bar ring, whether it is the bottom G early on, the open A through bars 31 to 36, or the open D under the chromatic climb at the end. When the crossings are even, the harmony underneath does all the rest of the work.