LDV88-9

In his manuscript, Bach wrote ‘Sei Solo’. Of course, ‘sei’ does mean ‘six’ in Italian, but the plural should be ‘soli’. And so, rather than ‘six solos’, scholars have sometimes interpreted these two words as a contraction of ‘Tu sei solo’, that is, ‘You are alone’. What do you think of that idea? Therein lies both the power and the problem of this music. When you play it, you feel the plenitude of the existential, cosmic questions raised by Bach, and at the same time you do have a sense of solitude. Feeling alone is the only way to become aware of the abyss, of the infinite. It’s a sense of the absolute that is becoming more and more insurmountable for me. And that’s even more the case in the Sonatas and Partitas than in the Cello Suites or the keyboard works, because of the extreme difficulty of the set, especially in the fugues of the sonatas, which are really far-fetched in their dimensions, given the nature of the violin. The way they’re written is utopian, like squaring the circle, for an instrument that is not naturally polyphonic. 15 DAVID GRIMAL