Johann Sebastian Bach's Harpsichord Concerto No. 3 in D major, BWV 1054, is an adaptation of his own Violin Concerto in E major, BWV 1042. He made it sometime during the 1730s for performance by the Leipzig Collegium Musicum—a large ensemble made up of the city's music enthusiasts that played in taverns and coffee shops a few times a week. Bach had been director since 1729. Most, if not all, of Bach's harpsichord concertos are transcriptions of concertos for other instruments, but only in a few cases have those source pieces survived. A piece like BWV 1054 provides us with a wonderful opportunity to examine just how Bach went about recasting the old material into a new and very individual work for harpsichord.

The most obvious change by far is the transposition from E major down to D major (the second movement is moved from C sharp minor down to B minor accordingly)—standard operating procedure for the harpsichord transcriptions, in this case especially fortunate because the highest notes of the solo part in the violin version go a whole tone above what was possible on the normal harpsichord of the day. The course of the music remains unchanged, but the solo part cannot claim the same thing: the basic shapes in the part remain the same (they are filled out to exploit the harpsichord's polyphonic capabilities, naturally), but some of the figurations have changed to the point that wholly new melodic lines are sometimes drawn. Bach makes a couple of very slight tempo alterations, or perhaps just omissions: Allegro is indicated in the violin version, while the first movement has no indication at all in the harpsichord version (Allegro would be assumed); and the original Allegro assai marking at the head of the third movement is now simply Allegro.

© All Music Guide