Bach and Handel at the Keyboard, and Why Bach’s Suites Stayed in Piano Lessons

Almost every piano student meets Bach. A minuet from the Anna Magdalena Notebook, the C major Prelude, an Invention, and eventually a French or English Suite. Handel wrote keyboard suites that were more popular than Bach’s while both men were alive, and most students never touch them. That gap came up this fall in Keyboard Repertory I, part of my Master of Music program at USF, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it. Two composers, born the same year, writing for the same instrument, and only one of them became the backbone of piano lessons.

Handel Outsold Bach

In the 1971 article I’ve been reading, Phyllis K. Rueb writes that Handel’s harpsichord volumes outsold similar collections by Bach, Couperin and Rameau, and that they were the most popular pieces of their type in Europe. Today, she says, they are largely neglected.

Many of the suites were probably written for teaching. Handel taught the daughters of the Princess of Wales, and Rueb notes that a copy of lessons composed for one of the princesses sits in the Buckingham Palace Library. In 1720 a publisher named John Cluer issued eight of the suites with Handel’s consent. The preface, in Handel’s name, complains that pirated copies were already circulating. So these were working pieces for real students.

How Bach Built a Suite

Bach followed the German pattern in every one of his keyboard suites. You get an allemande, a courante, a sarabande and a gigue, in that order, with optional French dances such as a minuet, gavotte, bourrée or air tucked in before the gigue. A prelude may open the whole thing. Once you’ve learned the order, you know where you are in any Bach suite.

Inside each dance, the construction is tight. Rueb counted measures in the two halves of the dance movements in Bach’s English Suites, and the halves relate to each other in clean ratios such as 1:1, 1:2, 2:3 and 3:4. His sequences are built on longer motives, sometimes a full measure long. The rhythm drives forward like a small motor. And his counterpoint stays strict, with fugal writing saved for the opening movement and the gigue.

How Handel Built One

Handel didn’t bother with a fixed order. Rueb says his suites sit closer to the French ordre and the Italian sonata da camera than to the German dance suite. A Handel suite might open with a prelude in toccata style, move through a fugue, include an Allegro or Adagio that is not a dance at all, and end with a set of variations. Bach never wrote a passacaglia or chaconne inside a keyboard suite, and Handel did, more than once.

The sections are less balanced too. When Rueb ran the same measure count on the allemandes in Handel’s first collection, she found ratios like 8:9, 11:16 and 13:22, where Bach’s English Suite allemandes all come out at 1:1. Handel’s lines tend to move more quietly and sound more like singing. She credits him with a taste for “bright, sensuous sound” and for effect, and she points out that much of this music probably began as improvisation, since Handel was a masterly improviser at the harpsichord and organ. He also reused his own material.

The Research

Rueb’s method is a side-by-side comparison of form. She lays out the order of movements in Bach’s keyboard suites against Handel’s, then counts the measures in each half of the dance movements in Bach’s English Suites and in the first collection of Handel’s suites and sets the ratios next to each other in a chart. She supplements the counting with observations about sequences, rhythm, counterpoint and where fugues appear. It is a descriptive study. Rueb doesn’t argue that one composer was better, and she doesn’t explain why Bach’s suites lasted longer in the teaching repertoire. That part is my own reading.

Why Bach Stayed in the Lesson Books

Bach’s suites are built so that you can study them. The fixed order, the balanced halves, the independent voices and the strict counterpoint all give a teacher something to hold onto. You can assign one voice at a time, ask a student to hear the sequence, and measure the progress. A student who works through that material comes out with better hands and a better ear, and that makes Bach very easy to build a curriculum around.

Handel’s charm lives somewhere else. A lot of it was in the playing, in the flourish, the ornament, the spontaneous toccata passage. Rueb herself says those toccata-style movements are the closest we can come to hearing how Handel actually improvised. A printed page captures that less well than it captures a Bach fugue. Handel is harder to teach from, and I suspect that’s a big part of why his suites drifted out of lesson books while Bach’s became required reading.

The Harmonious Blacksmith

The best-known movement from these suites is the Air and Variations in E major, the fifth suite of the first collection. Most people know it as “The Harmonious Blacksmith.” Rueb points out that the nickname was a publisher’s invention that came long after Handel, with the earliest appearance she cites dating from about 1820. She compares it to the “Moonlight” Sonata, a title Beethoven never gave his piece. Plenty of people who know the tune don’t realize it belongs to a suite.

What This Means for Your Practice

Keep playing Bach. His music teaches you to hold several lines in your hands at once, to hear how a phrase is built, and to keep a steady pulse without pounding. If you’re practicing a Bach dance, play each voice alone, then in pairs, then together.

Then add some Handel. Handel teaches fluency. His passagework asks your fingers to move easily and your ear to enjoy sound for its own sake, and the variation movements teach you how to make the same idea feel new each time it returns. Two good starting points are the Passacaille from the G minor suite and the Air and Variations in E major. The Passacaille is built on a four-bar chord progression, with variations stacked over it, and Rueb ranks it among the best movements in the suites. The E major set starts simply and gets busier, so it’s an approachable way to practice speed and evenness one variation at a time.

A student who plays both composers ends up with more tools than a student who plays one. If you’re taking lessons with me in Clearwater and want Handel on your music stand next to your Bach, ask for it.

References

Rueb, Phyllis K. 1971. “Handel’s Keyboard Suites: A Comparison with Those of J. S. Bach.” American Music Teacher 20, no. 5 (April/May): 33-36. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43534014