In his G minor quartet composed in 1808 that our musicians will play on January 31st and February 1st, Georg Druschetzky is credited with one of the earliest revivals of the B-A-C-H motif.

What does it look and sound like? Below is the first line played by the oboe in the second movement, starting with the B-A-C-H motif (click on the sound file to hear the notes printed, listen to the oboe).

What meaning hides behind these notes?

In music, the BACH motif is the motif, a succession of notes important or characteristic to a piece, B flat, A, C, B natural. In German musical nomenclature, in which the note B natural is named H and the B flat named B, it forms Johann Sebastian Bach’s family name. One of the most frequently occurring examples of a musical cryptogram, the motif has been used by countless composers, especially after the Bach Revival in the first half of the 19th century.

Johann Gottfried Walther’s Musicalisches Lexikon (1732) contains the only biographical sketch of Johann Sebastian Bach published during the composer’s lifetime. There the motif is mentioned thus:

…all those who carried the name [Bach] were as far as known committed to music, which may be explained by the fact that even the letters b a c h in this order form a melody. (This peculiarity was discovered by Mr. Bach of Leipzig.)

This reference work thus indicates Bach as the inventor of the motif.

In a comprehensive study published in the catalogue for the 1985 exhibition “300 Jahre Johann Sebastian Bach” (“300 years of Johann Sebastian Bach”) in Stuttgart, Germany, Ulrich Prinz lists 409 works by 330 composers from the 17th to the 20th century using the BACH motif.

The 3-minute video below is a great explanation of the BACH motif, of how not only Druschetzky used it but also composers like Franz Liszt, Rober Schumann, Arnold Schoenberg and Arvo Pärt…

BTW, the instrument he is playing in the video is an oboe da caccia, a “hunting oboe”…

Thanks for reading, Hervé (with the help of Wikipedia and Youtube)