Since I released my solo CD in February of , many players have written to me offering information and asking questions about the viola d'amore, particularly about the CD. First, about dance in the baroque. It is hard for us to appreciate the importance of dance in the early 18th century. Being able to dance well was an essential part of the social skills of the time. All over Europe dancing masters taught dancing and decorum to the upwardly mobile.
Nearly every movement on this recording is a dance. Almost all are in binary form: AB. The exceptions to this are the Intrada and Rondeau of the Pezold A major partita. I don't believe people ever danced to the works on my CD, and Allemandes in particular are far removed from their dance origins. Pezold's menuets may be an exception. These are all 24 bars long, a handy length for the dance steps which form a twelve-bar pattern; it would be easy to use these menuets for dancing, as I have on occasion.
These menuets also have many characteristic rhythmic patterns and other features in common social dance menuets of the time. In Pezold, the border between utilitarian dance music and dance-style instrumental music is less clear than in the Bach Partita. While Christian Pezold's name is little known today, many beginning keyboard players have played his two Keyboard minuets that Bach included in the Notebook for Anna Magdalena.
Pezold was born in Koenigstein in and probably died in Dresden in , where he was court organist. He was famous as an organist and composer of church music, though few works survive. The two partitas heard on Many Strings Attached are extant in a single 18th-century source in the Dresden Landesbibliothek, from which many later copies derive. Her Will lists ten instruments: two bass violas da gamba, a guitarre, a viol d'amour, another viol d'amore, a Bariton, and larger bariton, a lyra, and two bassoons.
I was struck by the broad musical interests of the Pezold family, and can't help wondering whether the two partitas were written by Pezold for his wife to play. However, there would have been good professional reasons for Pezold to write this music for, say, Pisendel. Apparently, when Pisendel visited Venice in , he was with Frederick August's ensemble, the 'Kammermusik,' a group that also included oboist Johann Christian Richter, violone player Jan Dismas Zelenka and court organist Christian Petzold.
