János Starker won the 1998 Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Soloist Performance for his fifth recording of Six Unaccompanied Cello Suites. Yo-Yo Ma won the 1985 Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Soloist Performance for his album Six Unaccompanied Cello Suites. The suites have since been performed and recorded by many cellists. In 2019, the Casals recording was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry as 'culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant'. Casals became the first to record all six suites his recordings are still available and respected today.

The other four were recorded in Paris: 1 and 6 in June 1938, and 4 and 5 in June 1939. 2 and 3, at Abbey Road Studios in London. Although Casals performed the suites publicly, it was not until 1936, when he was 60 years old, that he agreed to record them, beginning with Suites Nos. It was Pablo Casals who first began to popularize the suites, after discovering an edition by Friedrich Grützmacher (who was the first cellist to perform an entire Bach suite) in a thrift shop in Barcelona in 1889 when he was 13. The suites were not widely known before the early 20th century.

Scholars generally believe that-based on a comparative analysis of the styles of the sets of works-the cello suites arose first, effectively dating the suites earlier than 1720, the year on the title page of Bach's autograph of the violin sonatas. 1 in G major, BWV 1007Īn exact chronology of the suites (regarding both the order in which the suites were composed and whether they were composed before or after the solo violin sonatas) cannot be completely established. History The first page from the manuscript by Anna Magdalena Bach of Suite No. They have since been performed and recorded by many renowned cellists and have been transcribed for numerous other instruments they are considered some of Bach's greatest musical achievements. ĭue to the works' technical demands, étude-like nature, and difficulty in interpretation because of the non-annotated nature of the surviving copies and the many discrepancies between them, the cello suites were little known and rarely publicly performed in the modern era until they were recorded by Pablo Casals (1876–1973) in the early 20th century. Dalkin of MusicWeb International called Bach's cello suites 'among the most profound of all classical music works' and Wilfrid Mellers described them in 1980 as ' Monophonic music wherein a man has created a dance of God'. The cello suites are structured in six movements each: prelude, allemande, courante, sarabande, two minuets or two bourrées or two gavottes, and a final gigue.

The title given on the cover of the Anna Magdalena Bach manuscript was Suites à Violoncello Solo senza Basso (Suites for cello solo without bass).Īs usual in a Baroque musical suite, after the prelude which begins each suite, all the other movements are based around baroque dance types. Bach most likely composed them during the period 1717–1723, when he served as Kapellmeister in Köthen. They are some of the most frequently performed solo compositions ever written for cello. The six Cello Suites, BWV 1007–1012, are suites for unaccompanied cello by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750). Title page of Anna Magdalena Bach's manuscript: Suites á Violoncello Solo senza Basso

Bach cello suites original manuscript