J. S. Bach’s Cello Suites, like his English Suites, all follow the same basic format: prelude, allemande, courante, sarabande, and gigue, with various modern dances known as “galanteries” placed in the penultimate position. Bach insisted that his students study a number of suites to develop an intimate knowledge of these various genres of stylized dances. Writings by his North German contemporaries—especially Johann Gottfried Walther’s Musicalisches Lexikon (1732) and Johann Mattheson’s Der vollkommene Capellmeister (1739)—offer some sense of how Bach may have understood the characters and styles of each dance type. Bach’s suites often exemplify elements of unity across the various movements, with musical motives or figures introduced in the prelude that recur in various ways across a suite. These elements of unity suggest the influence of a technique of musical variation discussed in Friedrich Erhardt Niedt’s Musikalische Handleitung (1706). The chapter closes with a complete analysis of Cello Suite No. 4 (BWV1010), illuminating harmony, form, motives, and possible Christian symbolism in the Prelude.

This chapter traces the transmission, performance history, and reception of J. S. Bach’s Cello Suites up through the dawn of the recording era. Composed around 1720, the Cello Suites circulated for their first century only in manuscript copies and were therefore only known by people with connections to the composer’s students. Various books and reference materials highlight the Sonatas and Partitas and Cello Suites in works lists and appraisals of the composer’s work, but these pieces were not widely played. The first published editions appeared starting in the 1820s, initially presenting the Cello Suites as instrumental studies. Subsequent editions with extensive editorial expressive markings and sometimes with added piano accompaniment aspired to adapt the Cello Suites to suit contemporaneous tastes, serving to usher them gradually into the concert hall. Starting around the 1860s, individual movements or groups of movements (and rarely complete suites) were performed in concerts primarily in Germany, England, and France. These performances were initially met with a mixed critical reception: While some concerts received rave reviews, other critics considered the Cello Suites to be historical curiosities or to be better suited for instrumental study than concert performances.

Whereas Bach’s Violin Solos are preserved in a calligraphic autograph manuscript, the lack of a surviving autograph of the Cello Suites has long been a problem for performers and critical editors alike. The Cello Suites survive in four manuscript copies, which musicians consult in facsimile copies to guide their choices about discrepant articulations, ornaments, and notes. For some 150 years, most cellists and editors have taken the manuscript copied by the composer’s second wife, Anna Magdalena Bach (Source A), to be a kind of surrogate for the lost autograph, despite the fact that it contains numerous inconsistencies as well as slur markings that are ambiguous or apparently inaccurate. A recent edition by Andrew Talle (2018) has reevaluated the four sources, drawing particular attention to Sources C and D, which had long been disregarded due to their geographical and temporal distance from the composer. However, these manuscripts were copied by excellent professional scribes working from another (now lost) manuscript in the possession of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. They moreover preserve various details, clarifications, and embellishments that were added through the composer’s initiative, probably in the context of lessons or music making, and which are not preserved in Anna Magdalena Bach’s copy.

J. S. Bach’s tenure as Capellmeister in Cöthen, with its focus on secular music, afforded an opportunity to explore the violin and cello as solo instruments. While his Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin represent the pinnacle of an established German tradition, the Cello Suites are among the earliest music composed for unaccompanied cello and may have been inspired partly by unaccompanied music for viola da gamba (pièces de viole). Bach’s Violin Solos and Cello Suites are both “opus collections”—sets of (usually six) pieces exemplifying his mastery of a particular genre or instrument. An obituary coauthored by Carp Philipp Emanuel Bach and Johann Friedrich Agricola illustrates the special importance the composer attached to these pieces. While Bach was best known during his lifetime as an organist, he had intimate knowledge and full mastery of the violin. There is no record of Bach playing cello, but his composition of virtuoso suites that draw a maximum musical effect from such minimal instrumental resources suggest an intimate knowledge of that instrument. Moreover, during Bach’s lifetime, an instrument called “viola da spalla”—considered a type of cello but played similarly to the violin—could have enabled a violinist to play the Cello Suites.

The Catalan cellist Pablo Casals, reputed to have “discovered” J. S. Bach’s Cello Suites, is better understood as their most influential popularizer. Through his extensive concert tours in the early twentieth century and culminating in his complete recording of the cycle in the 1930s, he solidified their place in concert life and established paradigms that remain influential today. Among these are the practice of only performing complete suites, with all repeats and without piano accompaniment. Casals’s exile to Prades, France, in protest of Franco’s dictatorship, abruptly ended his concert career and established Casals as a humanitarian figure, inspiring later generations of cellists who used the Cello Suites to advocate for peace and an end to human suffering. Examples include Mstislav Rostropovich’s impromptu performance after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Yo-Yo Ma’s performance at the US-Mexico border and outside the Russian embassy, and Denys Karachevtsev’s performance on the heavily bombed-out streets of Kharkiv. Cellists have recently experimented with playing the Cello Suites in unusual venues such as subways, mountaintops, and in community settings worldwide. The Cello Suites’ global resonance is evinced by the wide range of art and popular media they have inspired.