Keyboard Transcriptions of Bach’s Music for Unaccompanied String and Wind Instruments

The suites, sonatas, and partitas that Johann Sebastian Bach composed for solo violin, cello, flute, and lute are completely self-sufficient and require no additional harmony or accompaniment. Nevertheless, they are worthy of study by players of other instruments, and Bach himself arranged several of them for keyboard instruments. At least some of the lute pieces, moreover, may have been intended from the beginning for performance on keyboard as an alternative.

Transcriptions by others exist as well. As a student, probably in 1976 in Cambridge, Mass., I was fortunate to hear Gustav Leonhardt perform his harpsichord arrangement of the Sixth Cello Suite. Not long afterward I made my own transcriptions of all six of the suites for cello, following them up with arrangements of the pieces for violin, flute, and lute. My intention in every case was to create music that would be as idiomatic to the keyboard, and which would require as much virtuosity of the player, as the originals. This is why I felt the need to arrange even the lute pieces, which Bach seems to have left as thinly textured keyboard scores (he apparently left to others the transcription of this music into lute tablature). Over the years I have returned occasionally to these transcriptions to improve various details.

The results could hardly be mistaken for genuine keyboard works of Bach. Nevertheless, anyone wishing to play these arrangements is asked to mention my name in connection with any public performance and to introduce no substantive alterations to them, apart from standard ornamentation.

Bach usually transposed his own keyboard versions of music originally composed for other instruments. I have done the same in order to place each transcription in an optimal tessitura for the keyboard. The list below indicates both original and transposed keys for each piece and provides links to the individual arrangements (in pdf format).

Since originally uploading these arrangements in 2010, I have revised most of them and have been gradually reformatting the scores to yield more convenient page breaks. I will be grateful to anyone who finds errors or other problems in these arrangements for bringing them to my attention by writing to me at dschulen AT wagner.edu.

David Schulenberg

August 10, 2010, last updated Feb. 14, 2021