Suite.

In a general sense, any ordered set of instrumental pieces meant to be performed at a single sitting; during the Baroque period, an instrumental genre consisting of several movements in the same key, some or all of which were based on the forms and styles of dance music; then and later, a group of pieces extracted from a larger work, especially an opera or ballet, such as Carmen Suite or Nutcracker Suite. The term (from the French, meaning ‘those that follow’ or ‘succession’) did not come into common use until the last quarter of the 17th century, but the kinds of set to which it was eventually applied had a long history, and pairing of dances may be found as early as the 14th century. The suite served not only as a form for newly composed pieces, but also as a convenient way to arrange existing pieces in groups for publication and especially performance. After about 1750 the ‘classical’ form of the Baroque suite, which included allemande, courante, sarabande and gigue, became obsolete along with the term. The idea of the suite, however, taken in its more general sense, continued to flourish under various guises, and the term itself has since been revived. This article is concerned primarily with the history and content of suites and similar sets in Western music, regardless of what they were called; for a comprehensive account of the uses of the term itself, especially in Germany after 1750, see Schipperges (1992), and for discussion of suite-like formations in non-Western musics see MGG1 (‘Suite’, §B; H. Hickmann). See also Sources of keyboard music to 1660, §2.

DAVID FULLER

Suite

1. Terminology.

‘Suite’ entered the terminology of music in 1557 as a designation for a group of branles (see §3 below), and continued with that meaning until such groups ceased to be danced. From then until the 18th century, however, it was also used to mean ‘the following pieces’ or ‘one of the following pieces’, and usage often shifted freely between these various meanings, as is suggested in a contract for music lessons in 1631: the valet de chambre of the Marquise de Maulny was to be taught to play ‘les Branles de Belleville et suittes d'iceux, avecq les diminutions, les ballets de Monsieur avecq touttes leurs suittes’ on his violin. The broadening application of the term and the uncertainty whether it meant ‘group’ or ‘succeeding pieces’ are also apparent in a letter written by Constantijn Huygens to Du Mont in 1655: ‘ie vous ay faict copier toute la suite de ceste mesme Alemande’. The first writer to describe the suite (or ‘suit’) as a composite musical form with a conventional order of pieces resembling that of the ‘classical’ suite (see §5 below) was the Englishman Thomas Mace, according to whom it consisted of an improvised prelude followed by an allemande, ayre, courante, sarabande and toy ‘or what you please’, all linked by a common tonic and ‘some kind of Resemblance in their Conceits, Natures, or Humours’ (Music's Monument, 1676, p.120). Mace's introduction of the French-derived term is evidence that ‘suite’ as a term for groupings of allemandes, courantes and sarabandes had already been long established among lutenists in France, whence it probably came to England along with French tuning and musical styles. Four years before Mace, the term ‘suite’ first appeared in print as the heading for groups of diverse dances (i.e. not branles) in Adam Drese's Erster Theil etlicher Allemanden, Couranten, Sarabanden, Balletten, Intraden und andern Arien (1672). It was first used in the title of a collection in 1674, in Dietrich Becker's Erster Theil zweystimmiger Sonaten und Suiten, however, as late as Walther's Lexicon (1732), where the allemande is likened to a rhetorical ‘Proposition, woraus die übrigen Suiten, als die Courante, Sarabande, und Gique, als Partes fliessen’.

‘Sett’ was used by Mace as a synonym for suite, and was so used from time to time up to the 20th century (e.g. Henry Symonds, 1733; Henry Cowell, 1957). In The Musicall Grammarian (1728) Roger North also spoke of ‘setts of musick w[hi]ch were called fancys’, in which a fantasia is followed by dance movements (see Fantasia-suite). But ‘set’ more often meant a number of works of the same type, and except for sets of variations, it does not normally imply performance at a single sitting. During the 1750s, when the English keyboard suite was being replaced by the sonata, the meanings of ‘set’, ‘sonata’ and ‘lesson’ became confusingly tangled. Barnabas Gunn (1750) used ‘Six Setts of Lessons’ as the title of a print consisting of six multi-movement works headed ‘lesson’, not ‘sett’. J.-C. Gillier (1757) did the same, while William Felton (1750 and 1758) and J.C. Smith (1755) put ‘suits of lessons’ in their titles and used ‘lesson’ to head what are in effect sonatas. Finally, both ‘set’ and ‘suit’ were dropped from Gillier's Eight Sonatas or Lessons (1759). Another careless use of ‘suite’ is to be found in Roseingrave's edition of 42 Scarlatti sonatas, which are, of course, single pieces: XLII suites de pièces (1739), translated later as Forty-two Suits of Lessons (1754–6).

Both ‘sonata’ and ‘sinfonia’ have from time to time been applied to suites, even when the contents seem entirely removed from the influence of the Italian Sonata da camera, as in Silvius Weiss's Sechs Sonaten for lute (in manuscript). The interrelations of suite and sonata da camera are intricate, especially when the latter designation was used by non-Italians. Johann Rosenmüller seems to have been the first German to call a collection of suites Sonate da camera (1667, reprinted three years later), but he had been living in Venice for at least seven years, and the term ‘sonata’ had in any case been thoroughly naturalized in Germany long before. Rosenmüller's sonate da camera are ensemble suites of the type he had been composing since 1645 with added introductory sinfonias. A wavering between sonata and suite may be seen in violin music at the beginning of the 18th century, particularly as the influence of Corelli was felt. François Duval (1704) used ‘sonata’ and ‘suite’ interchangeably to designate sonatas, while J.C. Pez entitled a collection Sonate da camera or Chamber-musick consisting of Several Suites of Overtures and Airs (?1710).

Other terms that were used in the sense of suite include Partita(Parthie, Partia etc.), Overtureand, rarely, Ordre. The use of ‘ouverture’ as a designation for suites beginning with an overture was typically German and can be traced to Kusser (1682) and Erlebach (1693); then, beginning in 1697, to the publications of ‘Ouvertures avec tous les airs’ from Lully's operas by Estienne Roger of Amsterdam, who had a wide German distribution (see Schneider, 1989, and §7 below). The Germans also had a great affection for collective titles that indicated the social attitudes and intentions behind their vast production of suites. They may be roughly classified as ‘pleasure’ (J.C. Pezel, Delitiae musicales; Esaias Reusner (ii), Musicalische Gesellschafts-Ergetzung; Andreas Werckmeister, Musicalische Privatlust), ‘garden’ (J.A. Reincken, Hortus musicus; J.C.F. Fischer, Musicalisches Blumen-Büschlein), ‘table’ (Schein, Banchetto musicale; Biber, Mensa sonora; and a variety of Früchte) and ‘deprecatory’ (David Kellner, Handvol kurzweiliger Zeitvertreib; Matthias Kelz (ii), Joco-seria harmonia sacro-profana). These titles were usually followed by a listing of each type of piece in the collection; the division into suites, at least in collections before about 1675, can only be deduced from an examination of the contents.

France was the last country in the 18th century to abandon ‘suite’ as a living musical term. In 1767 C.-F. Clément finally dropped it as a designation for the groups of arrangements from favourite operas in his Journal de clavecin; at the same time (without introducing the term ‘sonata’) he put the middle ‘movements’ of his groups in contrasting keys. N.-J. Hüllmandel's Six divertissements ou IIe suite de petits airs (1783), Joseph Pouteau's Potpourri, ou Suite d'airs (1782), or Deux suites in Michel Corrette's hurdy-gurdy method (1785) show in what surroundings the suite fell into disuse. For the next half-century and more, the suite was memorialized in music dictionaries as an obsolete genre and term, with the exception of music for military band, especially French, around 1800 (for example G.-F. Fuchs's Suite militaire; see the articles on ‘Suite’ in the dictionaries of Castil-Blaze and Lichtenthal). Schumann, in his review of William Sterndale Bennett's Suite de pièces op.24 (1842) – one of the first serious examples of the form in the 19th century – called it a ‘good old word’. Gradually, ‘suite’ worked its way back into the normal terminology and practice of music and by the latter part of the century it was again used by composers and arrangers. In dictionaries, however, it continued to be treated as a historical term whose meaning had crystallized roughly along the lines of Bach's ‘English Suites’.

Suite

2. Theory.

Nearly all attempts to discover principles of the suite have suffered from an excessively restricted view of the repertory, most writers confining themselves to music with direct relevance to Bach. Underlying this approach has been the Darwinian notion of an organic form, the issue of a single act of composition, evolving from the Tanz-Nachtanz pair via the sturdy craftsmanship of Peuerl and Schein and the genius of Froberger to the supreme artistry of Bach, through a process of continual annexation of foreign elements and their integration into an ever higher governing plan. This conception can be found expressed over a century ago in ludicrously chauvinistic terms by Spitta (Eng. trans., ii, 84ff) and later more judiciously by Beck (Mw, Eng. trans., 1966, p.52). It was inevitable that Bach's suites should have tempted scholars to discover in them a constructive principle which, once identified, could be taken as the essence of the suite idea and traced back through this evolution, serving as a basis for comparative analysis. By shutting out the period of the Thirty Years War in Germany and most French and English instrumental music of the first 60 years of the 17th century, it is just possible to discern a historical process (painted in trompe l’oeil) wherein a suite principle might be concealed. Some of the principles that have been proposed are decreasing stylization (Besseler, Pearl), the alternation of stepping and leaping dances (Norlind, Seiffert, Riemann, Nef and others), the alternation of company and couple dances (Klenz, in connection with the sonata da camera), and the alternation or pairing of tempos and degrees of tension (Reimann and others). From such principles it is also possible to proceed to theories of ‘open’ and ‘closed’ forms (Reimann) and to systems of classification, like Kunstsuite versus Gebrauchssuite (Blume).

In all this theorizing and in similar unitary views of the suite there is the palpable implication of an analogy between suite and sonata. Marpurg was one of the first to imply it when he said that ‘a series of three or more keyboard pieces that are related to one another and so made that they cannot be separated but must remain together and be played one after the other … is sometimes called a suite … and sometimes a sonata’ (Clavierstücke, i, 1762, p.5). A remarkable amount of the speculation about principles of ordering is based on fixed ideas of the character of the dances, which in fact changed greatly during the course of the 17th century. The sarabande, for example, was sometimes fast and sometimes slow, and it is by no means always possible to tell from appearances what the speed is supposed to be. The gigue, especially, existed in radically varying guises, and one cannot be sure of the correct way of playing the many examples in 2/2 or 4/4 time. Far more important is the fact that the majority of suites, taken over the whole history of the genre, are simply too diverse to support a unified theory. Furthermore, for a large number of them, including some very influential ones like those from Lully and Handel's ‘Eight Great’ harpsichord suites, the composition of the pieces and their arrangement in order were two separate acts, sometimes carried out by two different people. Often it cannot be known how a suite came to be in its existing form. Finally, one cannot even be sure that many series of pieces (especially French ones) were meant to be played one after another at a single sitting. In practice, French lute and harpsichord pieces were more often than not played out of context, especially at home and in informal settings.

If the search for a principle of the suite is futile, there may be, nevertheless, one characteristic that always distinguishes suites from other multi-movement works. The quality of an aggregate – the character of a pastiche – seems never to be wholly absent. Unlike a sonata, a suite normally consists of individual pieces whose identity derives partly from the outside, even when one piece is generated from another by rhythmic transformation, as in a variation suite. Usually the pieces are based on the pre-existing forms and styles of dances, but they may also have programmatic associations indicated by titles, or they may actually have been assembled from some pre-existing work like a ballet. The suite character of Berg's Lyric Suite, to choose an example apparently far removed from a pastiche, is suggested by the tempo markings: Allegretto gioviale, Andante amoroso, Largo desolato, etc.; each piece seems to be devoted to an explicit affection – as we now know, the work follows a secret programme.

In the late Baroque period, when the interaction of sonata and suite was complex, tonality became a useful test of whether a piece should be called one or the other, and it was so recognized by 18th-century writers. The principle that all the pieces of a suite are in the same key became a part of dictionary definitions up to the present (a principle abandoned after 1800 by composers, needless to say). A rationale for key unity was invented; it was said that suites do not change key because of the difficulty of retuning one's lute (only the basses needed retuning), as if this slight difficulty should determine the tonal plan of suites for all media, but not of sonatas. Given the nature of the suite as a gathering-together of pieces, it was only natural that one of the oldest classification systems of Western music should govern the grouping: that of mode or key. Until tonality was explicitly recognized as a structural resource it would not have occurred to musicians to juxtapose whole pieces in different keys for tonal contrast (the odd exception by Marini or Jenkins notwithstanding). The tonal variety in the sonata was a result of its ancestry in single, multi-sectional pieces like the canzona, in which cadences in various keys succeeded one another. When composers finally recognized the suite as a genre in its own right, the tradition of key unity was already strong enough to have acquired the momentum to carry it well into the 18th century. This tradition did not prevent composers from contrasting the major and minor modes, however, a practice that was especially common in paired, alternating dances from the last quarter of the 17th century.

The unification of the suite by other than tonal means has been an intermittent concern of composers throughout its history. The true variation suite is the most obvious manifestation of this concern, but much more common is a linking of two or three (rarely all) pieces by thematic similarities that are sometimes unequivocal but perhaps more often vague enough to make it difficult to decide whether they are intentional, the result of chance, or the workings of the subconscious mind. In Handel's suite no.6 from the 1733 collection, for example, the courante is hardly more than a triple-metre version of the allemande (ex.1). A courante by Hardel (F-Pn Vm⁷Rés.674, f.35v), a pupil of Chambonnières, is also unmistakably based on the allemande (f.34r), but it is freer in its details (ex.2). In J.S. Bach's first cello suite, however, the thematic relationship is much more subtle, and only the emphasis on the b–c'–b at the top of the figuration suggests that it was not unintentional (ex.3).

The English fantasia-suites of the 17th century were often terminated with ‘conclusions’, outside the tempo and form of the final piece, which must be interpreted as a way of rounding off the whole work, and thus conferring a sort of unity on it. The same device was also used by Hieronymus Gradenthaler (1676), Pezel (1678) and Biber (1680). Preludes or introductions can produce the same effect; the longer they are, the more the following dances are felt as appendages, thereby seeming to depend upon the opening movement and to form a whole with it. Large-scale symmetries or balance within suites suggest the effort to construct a composite whole (see below in connection with D'Anglebert and Christophe Moyreau). Finally, the movements may be connected by half-cadences or they may be continuous with one another, as often happens in the 19th and 20th centuries (in Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite, for example). In later suites, tonal contrast of the inner movements produces the unity of an arch form.

Suite

3. Early history to about 1600.

The earliest instrumental dances to have survived come from the early and late 14th century in two manuscripts of French and Italian provenance respectively (F-Pn fr.844 and GB-Lbl Add.29987). Each contains eight estampies, numbered from one to eight in the earlier source and provided with titles in the later. In neither case is it a question of sequential performance, however, and hence of a ‘suite’; the length and complexity of the individual pieces, as well as the fact that they are in different keys, make this unlikely. But two other much shorter pieces in the Italian source, entitled Lamento di Tristano and La Manfredina, are each paired with a faster-moving piece using the same thematic material condensed and speeded up, called ‘La Rotta’. Here, among the earliest examples of notated dance music, is evidence of what was probably an ancient tradition that carried forward to form one of the many evolutionary threads of Renaissance and Baroque suite composition: the Tanz and Nachtanz, a pair of dances of which the first was danced with low or gliding steps and the second with high or leaping ones, and whose most familiar English manifestation was the pavan and galliard.

The surviving dance music of the 15th century is contained chiefly in dance manuals and collections of basse danse tenors. The dance manuals, notably those of Domenico da Piacenza (or da Ferrara; 1445), Antonio Cornazano (1455), Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro (c1463, also published under the name Giovanni Ambrosio as he was later known), supply evidence that confirms and illuminates what is adumbrated in La Manfredina and Lamento di Tristano, namely a practice widespread in Italy and extending to Germany of creating pairs and sometimes larger groups of dances out of the same material. In the case of the archetypal bassadanza–saltarello pair, the material was a tenore (cantus firmus) which served as the basis for improvised polyphony. It could be danced in four mensurations, corresponding to four dance types: the grave bassadanza, the moderate quadernaria, the livelier saltarello and the quick piva. Three and even four of these were used in the pantomimic balli, though the norm for ordinary dancing was the pair (see Basse danse).

The French equivalent of the bassadanza–saltarello, known principally through the dance treatise of Michel de Toulouse (1480s) and the magnificent manuscript B-Br 9085, was the basse danse and pas de Brabant, though the evidence for coupling the latter to the former is indirect. The combination was called basse danse majeure, and the freer ballo, basse danse mineure. An internationally popular example of the latter, Rôti bouilli joyeux, in the version in the Brussels manuscript (facs. in J.L. Jackman, ed.: Fifteenth-Century Basse Dances, Wellesley, MA, 1964) shows certain features linking it to the suite idea (see Heartz, ‘A 15th-Century Ballo’, 1966). Three dance tenors in three different kinds of rhythm succeed one another: ‘Roti boully ioyeulx en pas de breban’; ‘Lomme et la famme ensemble doibvent faire cecy deux fois. Et puis sensuit la basse danse’; and the basse danse itself with choreographic directions. Evidently the order of basse danse–pas de Brabant was reversed for the basse danse mineure. The order was determined by choreographic rather than musical considerations, but to the ear the result would have been a set of three rhythmically contrasting pieces unified by the melodic similarity of the tenors of the first and last and enlivened by the improvised accompaniments of the other instruments.

Although no written part-music clearly intended for dancing has survived from the 15th century, an idea of the probable character of these accompaniments can be formed from a four-voice dance pair discovered and published by Heartz (‘Hoftanz’, 1966); a 16th-century source (D-Bsb 1516) also offers evidence of the penetration of the basse danse into Germany under the name of ‘Hoftanz’, albeit with rhythmic modifications. In this case, the afterdance, called ‘Tripl’ (another term, ‘Hoppertanz’, suggests saltarello), is based on a different tenor from that of its companion, whose tune, Le petit Rouen, appears in basse danse sources of the preceding century.

Some time in the later 15th century, a new kind of basse danse appeared, called ‘commune’ (the older type being then called ‘incommune’). The first polyphonic examples now known, those in Attaingnant's lute and ensemble collections of 1530, were based not on the old tenors but mainly on the newly fashionable chansons musicales, adapted to fit the two sections of 20 and 12 steps into which the variable 15th-century choreography had crystallized. The second section, called by Attaingnant recoupe, by Arbeau retour, and more generally moitié, was often followed by a third piece, of independent lineage, called ‘tourdion’; and the three, unified by key, though not necessarily by musical material or even mode, were recognized as a typical set as late as 1589 by Arbeau (Heartz, 1964).

Another grouping of three dances, descended from the second, third and fourth mensural transformations of the bassadanza, made its appearance in the fourth book of Petrucci’s Intabolatura de lauto (1508). Here the arranger, J.A. Dalza, called attention to what he must have felt was an important feature of his collection: ‘Nota che tutte le pauane hanno el suo saltarello e piua’. In 1546, Dalza’s grouping of pieces was used (rhythmically, if not in the choice of terms for the dances) in a tablature by Antonio Rotta, and, with the second and third pieces reversed, in another by Domenico Bianchini of the same year. This new order, in Bianchini's terminology, Pass'e mezzo, La sua padoana, Il suo saltarello, was taken up in the four collections of 1561–79 by Giacomo Gorzanis and in Matthäus Waissel's tablature of 1573. The Italians continued in general to base all the dances of a group on the same thematic material, using techniques involving variation on a ground, parody and paraphrase. P.P. Borrono (1536, 1546 and 1548) was an exception with his sets, which consisted of a pavan followed by three saltarellos, of which only the first was derived from the pavan. The second of these collections contains a remark indicative, like Dalza’s, of a concern for the overall form of his groups in performance: where the last two saltarellos are missing, one should borrow them from other groups. Here an Italian was recommending explicitly what others had tacitly practised, namely the occasional compilation of suites from independent sources.

The first known groups of pieces bearing the name ‘suite’ were the suyttes de bransles in Estienne du Tertre's Septième livre de danceries of 1557 (fig.1). Arbeau (Orchesographie, 1588) described many sequences of branles, a common one being branle double, branle simple (these two sedate ones for the elderly at a ball), branle gay (for the young marrieds), and branles de Champagne or de Bourgogne (for the youngest and most agile). For Arbeau, the gavotte was a ‘miscellany of double branles, selected by musicians and arranged in a sequence’ (Eng. trans., 175); here and elsewhere (pp.129, 137) he made it clear that it was normally the musicians at a dance who assembled the branles into suites, drawing on their memory or on tablatures in which the branles were classified by type, if at all, and ordering them according to the demands of the dancers or current fashion. Thus, with rare exceptions, the printed ‘suites’ of branles constituted the raw material for practical use, and not the finished products themselves; for the groups as played, there could be no question of musical unification beyond similarity of key.

The vast majority of dance groups from the 1540s to the end of the century are pairs; and of this majority, the overwhelming majority again are pairs of which the first dance is either a pavan or a passamezzo and the second either a galliard or a saltarello. Since the two dances in each position are rhythmically and historically related, the actual variety of pairs drawn from these four dances is smaller than the names might suggest. Normally, the dances of a pair are based on the same material – one of the passamezzo progressions, perhaps with a tune as well, a vocal piece, an earlier version of one of the dances and so on.

Here, not less than in larger dance groups (branles excepted), the tangential relation to variation sets is obvious, and with the expansion of the individual dances of a group into subsets of variations, written or improvised, to meet the requirements of the ballroom or to amuse the amateur player, variation and suite became increasingly interwoven. Two ambitious complexes by Giorgio Mainerio (first printed in Il primo libro de balli, 1578) are essentially expanded passamezzo-saltarello pairs in which both dances are followed by a ripresa (which carries on with the rhythm and certain motifs of the parent dance but abandons its phraseology and passamezzo progression). The first three of the resulting four sections are presented in three to five ‘modi’, or variations. Each complex has a total of 13 strains, all more or less related thematically. Such complexes became very common in German lute music.

In Italy, France and England towards the end of the century the development of entertainments involving both theatrical and social dancing (mascheratas, balli, ballets de cour and masques) brought further initiatives with consequences for the suite. Successions beginning with an entrée or intrada and continuing with varied dances were either chosen from among current social types or specially composed to accompany mimed action. On the evidence of the music that has survived from these early, quasi-theatrical festivities – most of it known in early 17th-century arrangements for lute (Robert Ballard, 1611 and 1614) or ensemble (Praetorius, 1612) or through the schematic renderings of André Philidor (1680–1700), or through dance manuals (Fabritio Caroso, 1581, Cesare Negri, 1602) – groups of pieces were unified by key and sometimes by subtle thematic connections, though not usually by variation procedures. Contrast was achieved through rhythm, shifts of mode, occasional harmonic surprises (Ballard, ballets Des esclaves and Des chevaux), and, if Ballard's versions reflect anything of the originals, sharply distinctive textures.

Suite

4. Early 17th century.

The two decades preceding the Thirty Years War saw an extraordinary burst of creativity in European instrumental music, accompanied by and perhaps partly resulting from a lively exchange of musicians among all countries and a growing consciousness of national styles. The English presence throughout northern Europe was especially prominent during this period owing to the travels of the musicians themselves and to extensive German publication of their works. Italy continued to be a magnet and a training-ground, and the traffic between England and France was intense because of royal connections. France exported dancing-masters and lutenists, and German anthologists made a special place for Polish dances in their collections. The Low Countries were a crossroads and haven for exiles; the Italians took up the Spanish guitar and its music with enthusiasm. All this mobility left its mark on the suite, though it is not always possible to tell in what direction the influences were moving because of the lack of dates to establish precedence.

The usual groupings of dances of the late Renaissance persisted until after 1600, though the popularity of the ensemble canzona in Italy apparently diverted further development of the large passamezzo complexes from ensemble to keyboard (e.g. a 30-page Pass'e mezzo antico di sei parti and Saltarello in Giovanni Picchi's Intavolatura di balli, 1621, for harpsichord). The favourite dance in Italy was the galliard without pavan, which was rare in Italy at this period (G.F. Anerio and Salamone Rossi, 1607; also G.M. Trabaci, 1615, with nine galliards in a row).

It was mainly in the field of practical dance music that the Italians produced suites during this period. Antonio Brunelli published a ‘balletto’ ‘danced by the noble ladies of Pisa’ in a version for five voices with text and an ornamented intabulation for chitarrone ‘per sonare solo senza cantare’ (Scherzi … libro terzo, 1616). It consisted of a ballo grave, a seconda parte in gagliarda, and a terza parte in corrente all related thematically (Nettl, 1921). Two years later, Lorenzo Allegri brought out a collection of eight balli, each with a note giving the occasion of its performance (Il primo libro delle musiche, 1618). The first (printed in Beck, 1964) has the same scheme as Brunelli's. Others have four or more pieces, including two brandi, a canario and a gavotta. In both Brunelli and Allegri, the dances are derived from the first of the group by rhythmic transformation. In Monteverdi's Scherzi musicali of 1607, there is an entrata followed by seven texted dances in contrasting rhythms. The dances have but one strain and several are connected by half-cadences (the composer may be Monteverdi's brother, Giulio Cesare).

One of the liveliest figures in Germany at the turn of the century was Valentin Haussmann, who gathered Polish and East Prussian dances for his collections and also included English pavans and galliards in a publication of 1604. Like Brunelli's balletto, Haussmann's many dance pairs show the overlap between vocal and instrumental music at the time. His Neue liebliche Melodien (five editions, 1598–1606) have German texts but are ‘mehrern theils zum Tantze zu gebrauchen’, and some of his Neue artige und liebliche Täntze (six editions between the same years) are texted, some not. In the preface to Venusgarten (1602), Haussmann confirmed what common sense suggests: that after-dances could be improvised where needed; at the same time, he made a puzzling distinction: as an alternative to extemporization, the players might follow ‘Polish usage’ (unexplained). Other composers or anthologists of ensemble dance music in the first decade of the 17th century were Coler, J.C. Demantius, Melchior Franck, Balthasar Fritsch, Johann Groh, H.L. Hassler, Georg Hasz, Mathias Mercker, Johann Staden and Johann Staricius. Christian Hildebrand of Hamburg brought out two important collections containing much English music in 1607 (with Zacharias Füllsack) and 1609. The younger Bernhard Schmid's keyboard tablature of 1607 ends with 12 galliards. A few passamezzo complexes for lute are in the Gresse manuscript (NL-Uim) and the tablature of J. Arpinus. In general, groupings in all this production are confined to Tanz–Nachtanz pairs, with other dances distributed at random in the sources or else (especially in the case of galliards) arranged by type.

With the exception of the lute tablatures of Anthoine Francisque (Le trésor d’Orphée, 1600) and the expatriate J.-B. Besard (Thesaurus harmonicus, 1603), and an anonymous collection of Airs nouveaux et chansons à dancer … bransles, voltes, courantes, ballets & autres (1608), there is a remarkable lack of dated sources for French dance music from these years. But the evidence of what remains and of slightly later sources like Robert Ballard's lute tablature of 1611 makes it clear that the typical suites were sets of airs from ballets or the traditional sets of branles. Other dances were classified by type – Besard devoted whole volumes to a single type. Within these volumes, pieces with the same tonic (but sometimes with different tunings of the bass strings) were grouped together. The French were not interested in dance pairs of the German type, though the varied repeats in Ballard's pieces exhibit a richly developed technique based perhaps on English models but emphasizing broken textures rather than ‘divisions’.

Across the Channel, the pavan–galliard complexes continued, reaching their limit of expansion perhaps in Scotland with William Kinloch's ‘lang’ pavan and galliard for keyboard from Duncan Burnett's music book (GB-En, c1615). This set, which runs to no fewer than 243 long bars, has the usual varied repeats in the pavan, and the resulting complex is again varied. But what is not so common is that the galliard is entirely based on the pavan and duplicates its pattern of variations (Caldwell, 1973).

The impulse towards new suite-like groupings seems to have emanated from England, the chief agents being William Brade and John Coprario. But there is no evidence to prove that the former did not find the stimulus for his ideas in Germany, or the latter for his in Italy; nor is it possible to say anything more precise about Coprario's fantasia-suites than that they must have been written before his death in 1626. Nothing is known of Brade before his appearance as an established musician on the Continent in 1594; his suites a5, consisting of paduana, galliard and either ‘allmand’ or ‘coranta’, cannot be completely explained by reference to either English or German practice, though his coupling in certain instances of a canzona (i.e. a free contrapuntal piece) with dance movements suggests a possible link with Coprario. In any case, the first publication anywhere to consist of suite-like groupings as a series of uniformly constituted composite works was Peuerl's Newe Padouan, Intrada, Däntz und Galliarda of 1611. The individual dances were simply numbered consecutively, as was to be the practice for the next 75 years, but the tenfold recurrence of four dances in the order indicated by the title, the key unity, and above all the similarity of thematic material make clear the composer's intention to compose integrated ‘suites’.

The climax of this brief evolution, Schein's Banchetto musicale (1617), contains 20 sequences of paduana, gagliarda, courente, allmande and tripla. Here, the principle of decreasing stylization cited above (§2) can be seen at its clearest: the richly polyphonic five-part pavanes in the English manner resolve gradually to the less complicated textures of the popular allemande (the German Tantz) and tripla, the simplicity of these last two reflected in the reduction of the number of parts from five to four. The dances of each suite were so ordered ‘dass sie beydes in Tono und inventione einander fein respondiren’ (composer's preface); and indeed the thematic correspondence among the more stylized dances is varied, elaborate and often subtle. The tripla, on the other hand, is merely the allemande (itself a kind of reduction of the preceding dances to thematic essentials) transformed metrically, in the manner of an extemporized Nachtanz.

A year later, Isaac Posch (like Peuerl, an Austrian) published his Musicalische Ehrenfreudt, with some Balletten and 15 sets of three thematically related dances of which the second, a Tantz, corresponds to Schein's allmande and is similarly followed by its tripla. The first dance is either a galliard or a courante. Posch's title and foreword supply precious information about the way this music was used. As one might imagine, it was played at dinner, banquets, weddings and ‘andern erlichen Conviviis’ in distinguished households; but the composer wrote that the Balletten were most suitable for the table, while the suites could be used either at table or afterwards for dancing. On the extemporizing of Nachtänze (he used the term ‘Proportion’), he complained that the practice by ‘most composers’ of omitting the Nachtanz allows each musician to play it as he likes, leading to great disorder. A correct Proportion, such as the ‘most distinguished present-day dancers’ are accustomed to, is therefore provided for each Tantz.

Deeply rooted as it was in the Tanz-Nachtanz tradition, the variation suite occupied but a tiny corner of published German dance music of the first 20 years of the 17th century – four collections out of more than 50, all appearing between 1609 and 1618. Its importance was a matter of high musical quality rather than of representative or seminal force. Brade, Peuerl and Posch all went on to publish later collections, but none continued with the suite idea, reverting to the more usual pairs and miscellanies. It was nearly 20 years before another set of uniformly constituted suites, Vierdanck's Erster Theil newer Pavanen, Gagliarden, Balletten und Correnten (1637), appeared in Germany. The 11 suites of this collection also marked what may have been the first appearance in Germany of works for two violins and continuo. Vierdanck's pavans and galliards were related; nevertheless, the vitality had gone out of the variation suite, and although suites of thematically related dances continued to be written throughout the 17th century and into the 18th, as described above (§2), and although courantes were fairly often related thematically to the allemandes that preceded them, the only systematic collection of variation suites to be published was the Hortus musicus (1688) by Reincken, who also left eight variation suites for keyboard in manuscript (Hill, 1987). According to Niedt (pt ii, 1706, 2/1721), the composition of different suite dances on the same bass appears to have been cultivated as a pedagogical exercise around the time of Bach.

The Terpsichore of Michael Praetorius (1612) belongs to the history of French rather than German dance music. Praetorius said in his preface that most of the more than 400 tunes were given him by Antoine Emeraud, dancing-master to the Duke of Brunswick; those, Praetorius himself harmonized. Others had been composed by P.F. Caroubel, and of still others Praetorius had the treble and bass and supplied the inner parts. The melodies, if not all the settings, may safely be taken as representative of the repertory of the French court violinists under Henri IV. Somewhat less than half the collection is taken up with ballets and suites of branles. To what extent the former are complete or the latter were assembled by Praetorius himself is not clear. Neither the suites of branles nor the ballets always stay in the same key. The second set of branles, called ‘Branle simple de Novelle’, has its first six tunes (the same as the first six in the Ballet des cornemuses, Robert Ballard, 1614) transposed from D to C because players might find the key of D ‘sehr schwehr und gar zu frembd’! There follow four tunes in D minor or D major and two more in C, after which one is to finish the suite with nine tunes from the preceding set, which is in G major and minor. Nothing is said about transposing to bring all these dances into the same key, though a general remark giving licence to transpose occurs in the preface. Transposition is not indicated for the ballets, however, which sometimes drift through several keys (Ballet de Monseigneur le prince de Brunsweig; Ballet de Monsieur de Vendosme faict a Fontainebleau). The dances of the ballets are not thematically related. Some of the branle groups, however, are subtly unified through a similarity of the melodic curve (II) or of motifs (XIV).

Suite

5. The classical suite before the addition of the gigue.

The ‘classical’ suite (the inverted commas are a reminder that the meaning is not ‘the suite of the Classical period’) is understood here to be the sequence allemande, courante, sarabande (hereafter identified as A–C–S) with or without a gigue (G) and with or without additional pieces. Reduplication of the dances, especially courantes, the addition of doubles (variations), the interpolation of pieces among the basic four dances, and the presence of introductory movements do not affect the ‘classical’ status so long as the basic condition is met that the suite should be of reasonable length for playing in a single sitting.

The development of the classical suite took place in two stages, marked off by the introduction of the gigue in the years around 1650. The gigue was never very firmly attached, however, and suites with an A–C–S core continued to be written in great numbers. Suites lacking one or two of these dances may be said at least to bow in the direction of ‘classicism’ if the remaining ones come at the beginning or just after the introduction. The beginning of this development can be located quite accurately in the decade 1620–30 and on the London–Paris axis; but at what point on the axis it occurred, or on the initiative of which composers, is not yet known.

Allemandes and courantes – though not as A–C pairs – are found in considerable numbers in Dutch and Flemish publications beginning around 1570, and when the two dances are listed in titles, the allemandes are usually mentioned before the courantes. This conventional order (with or without interpolated dances) persists in titles and is reflected in collections throughout the history of the two dances. It is so ubiquitous, in fact, that one must remind oneself that A–C pairs are extremely rare and can in no sense be considered an ancestor of the classical suite. The two dances are first found in regular juxtaposition only in connection with the sarabande, whose introduction seems to have had a catalytic effect on the formation of the suite. The first musical examples of the sarabande do not predate 1595, and the French type, the one incorporated into the classical suite, is much later (Devoto, 1966). The initiative for the A–C–S group must have lain in one of three places: with the dancing-masters of the French court, with composers of English consort and masque music, especially William Lawes, or with the Parisian lutenists. Buch (1993) noted instances from 1608 to 1617 of French court ballet groups beginning with a dance in duple time and ending with a sarabande. Lefkowitz (1960) claimed for Lawes a version of his Royall Consort dating back to the 1620s, which would put him among the first to combine A–C–S in one suite. Yet the first such groups that can be firmly dated occur in the Tablature de mandore de la composition du Sieur Chancy (Paris, 1629). This little-known publication, perhaps the most important single milestone in the history of the suite, contains six ‘pre-classical’ suites and a suite of branles whose contents deserve to be listed in full: Recherche (an unmeasured prelude) A–3C–S–passemaise–chanson–volte (Ie veux mourir au cabaret); recherche–A–2C–S; recherche–A–2C–S; recherche–A–3C–S; 7 branles; recherche–A–2C–S–Les Rocantins; recherche–A–2C–volte pour Dardon–S. It is not likely that a completely new kind of suite was invented for such a modest instrument as the mandora; furthermore, there is nothing tentative about the arrangement of these suites: the A–C–S core is unvarying.

The appearance of A–C–S groups coincides with two other developments in lute music: the introduction of new tunings and a thoroughgoing transformation of the style of the allemande from the square-phrased, popular Renaissance type to the stylized, quasi-contrapuntal, irregularly phrased type of the 17th century. In 1623 Robert Ballard had issued a collection entitled Tablature de luth de differents auteurs sur l'accord ordinaire et extraordinaire, in which some of the pieces evidently required modifications of the traditional Renaissance tuning (the vieil ton: G–D–F–A–D–G); unfortunately nothing remains but the title-page. In 1631 the same publisher put out a collection in which the vieil ton was abandoned altogether in favour of two new ones: G–C–F–A–C–E and G–C–F–A–C–E. Here, for the first time, tunings may be observed influencing suite groupings. In Ballard's anthology, a dozen pieces by François de Chancy are divided into two groups of entrée (another term for an unmeasured prelude)–A–3C–S, the first in A using tuning no.1 and the second in C using the other tuning. Later in the same collection, two A–2C–S groups by Chevalier are similarly differentiated, though the suite in tuning no.2 is in D minor instead of C. A looser and perhaps more typical group is that by Dufaut, all in one key and one tuning, and consisting of P–4A–5C–2S.

In 1625 Charles I married Henrietta Maria, sister of Louis XIII, and with the new queen came a new wave of French musical influence, which was felt especially as it impinged on the court masque. The sarabande, rare in masques before 1632, appeared suddenly after that date in ‘hundreds’ of examples at the end of A/Ayre–C–S suites (Lefkowitz, 1970, p.19). At the same time, manuscript copies of Lawes's Royall Consort began to proliferate (but see Lefkowitz's claim, cited above, of a version from the 1620s) in which the number and order of the particular pieces is never the same, but the scheme A/Ayre+–C+–S (+ means one or more), sometimes introduced by a pavan or a fantasia, frequently recurs in key groups as simple as A–C–A–C–S or as extended as Ayre–A–C–Echo–C–S–Pavan–3Ayres–C–2S–2Ayres–2C–A–C–S. His ‘Harpe Consorts’ are much more uniform; but in neither series are the suite groups marked with any headings.

There can be no doubt that the initiative for A–C–S formations lay elsewhere than in keyboard music. There is but one keyboard source containing allemandes, courantes and sarabandes even part of which can be dated with any certainty in the 1620s; this is a German keyboard tablature originating possibly in Rostock and bearing against one piece in the first section the date 1626 (DK-Kk kgl.saml.376). The allemandes, courantes, and sarabandes in this part cannot possibly be connected in groups, however (as has been claimed); the only plausible groups in the manuscript are much later and are in any case under the heavy influence of French lute music. The compilation of an important Sweelinck source (D-Bsb Lynar A1), though it may have begun as early as 1615 (Breig, 1967, Gustafson, 1976), extended over decades. There is but one A–C–S group and it comes at the very end. With the fantasia that precedes it, it is set off by peculiarities which, while reinforcing the impression that a suite is intended, suggest that it was added well after the rest of the manuscript was complete. Not far back are eight courantes, most or all arranged from French lute pieces, showing that the compiler could not have written down his suite in ignorance of the Parisian repertory.

There is no evidence in French sources for a keyboard equivalent of the first lute suites; indeed, before 1650 there are no French keyboard sources of any kind that contain the classical suite dances, much less suites. Evidently French harpsichordists improvised diminutions on fashionable airs during this period, as Mersenne illustrated with Pierre de La Barre (iii)'s fragmentary variations on O beau soleil (1636), but the sudden appearance of all the suite dances and a few suites in numbers of keyboard manuscripts immediately after 1650 provides circumstantial evidence of a development of the genre extending back several years.

Although French orchestral music for ballets and social dancing before 1629 (some of it preserved in the late 17th-century manuscripts of André Philidor) might have suggested the formation of groups of dances beginning with a piece in duple time and ending with a sarabande (Buch, 1993), the surviving sources do not contain any A–C–S sets that could have supplied a model for the mandora suites by Chancy (see above), in spite of the fact that among the earliest sources of this music are transcriptions for lute (Robert Ballard, 1611 and 1614). A–C–S sequences must have been established in the repertory of French orchestral music well before 1650, however, since these formations had spread to Germany and Sweden by that time. The Kassel manuscript of orchestral dances, written between approximately 1650 and 1668 (Echorcheville 1906), contains, in addition to sets of branles, half a dozen A–C+–S sequences, incorporated in larger groups; a contemporary Swedish source (S-Uu 409) with concordances to Kassel has 35 varied suites reflecting French practice, most of them with an A–C–S framework (Mráček, 1976). The background to these groupings can only be surmised; the music is French, but the setting was German, and by the time the manuscripts were begun the Germans had already started publishing ensemble suites using allemande, courante and sarabande.

Italy's contribution to the classical suite can be briefly summarized. In ensemble music, the Italians kept the old Renaissance classification of dances by genre until well after the mid-century. The various groupings characteristic of the mature sonata da camera became general usage only in the 1660s and 1670s (Klenz, 1962). Torelli's Concerti da camera (1686), 12 three-movement suites for two violins and bass, begins with a single A–C–S; all the other groups are different. Groupings of two and occasionally three pieces, both dance and non-dance, were more common in Italian keyboard sources of the second and third quarters of the 17th century than modern editions would suggest (Silbiger, 1980), but although correntes are found in quantity, A–C–S groups were rare or non-existent. In 1650, Bernardo Gianoncelli (‘Il Bernardello’) published a theorbo tablature containing original little groups of ‘tasteggiata’, ‘gagliarda’ and ‘spezzata’ – the first being a prelude and the last a double of the second. Late in the century suite groups are found in the works of B. Pasquini, but these were based not on the classical model but on the sonata da camera (ApelG). Only the guitarists seemed to care for A–C–S groups, the most influential figures being A.M. Bartolotti (1640) and Francesco Corbetta (1643) (Pinnell, 1980). The French influence is clear, and one agent of transmission may well have been Pierre Gautier ‘Orleanois’, whose lute book, published in Rome in 1638, consisted overwhelmingly of allemandes, courantes and sarabandes loosely arranged in key groups.

In Germany, allemandes, courantes and sarabandes for instrumental ensemble after French models were published as early as the 1630s, but as in DK-Kkkgl.saml.376, and in the keyboard tablature of Regina Clara Imhoff of Nuremberg (A-Wn Hs.18491), compiled probably between about 1630 and 1645 for home use, they were not arranged in A–C–S keygroups but entered apparently without any plan. The titles of Andreas Hammerschmidt's Paduanen, [Canzonen,] Galliarden, Balleten, Mascharaden, françoischen Arien, Courenten und Sarabanden (1636, 1639) seem to acknowledge both the classical grouping and its origin, but the Arien turn out to be very different from allemandes, and there is only one keygroup with more than two dances. Kindermann's Deliciae studiosorum (1640–43) has some suites containing all three of the core dances, but in differing orders. A single A–C–S suite by Johann Schop (1640), set for three parts and included with some wedding music, (MGG1) appears to be the first German example and the first such suite to have been published outside France. Of about 550 ensemble suites published in Germany from then until 1700, a little over half consisted of the A–C–S core, with or without a gigue (see §6 below) or other additional pieces up to a total that averged around six and rarely exceeded ten (Whitehead, 1996). The main composers who contributed to the repertory without gigues were Johann Rosenmüller (1645, 1654, 1667), Nikolaus Hasse (1656), Werner Fabricius (1656), J.C. Horn (1663), J.H. Beck (1666, 1670) and Adam Drese (1672).

Suite

6. The classical suite after the addition of the gigue.

Suite, §6: The classical suite after the addition of the gigue

(i) England.

The addition of the gigue to suite formations occurred in the decade surrounding 1650, apparently everywhere at once: Although there are no documents to prove it, it is likely that the gigue (or jig) was incorporated into the French lute repertory in the 1640s by lutenists who had visited or worked in England, such as Jacques Gautier. (While for convenience the French gigue is treated here as a single dance genre, in practice it varied from a duple-metre piece, indistinguishable on paper though probably not in performance from the allemande, with which it was often confused in the sources of French lute music, through a richly-textured, more or less homophonic piece in compound metre, like some by Louis Couperin and D'Anglebert, to an imitative type sometimes indistinguishable from the canarie – these last two in a variety of triple rhythms and, apparently, tempos.) There are no gigues in Ballard's large engraved tablature of 1638 nor any by Mesangeau, who died that year. On the other hand, there are several by Ennemond Gaultier, who died in 1651. Gigues by Denis Gaultier and Germain Pinel are found in sources that date from around 1650. From France the gigue appears to have spread rapidly through German-speaking lands along with the French lute repertory. Its incorporation into the classical suite, however, was irregular, occurring differently in different places and repertories, and A–C–S–G never achieved the ubiquity of A–C–S.

England was the first country to print full classical suites with gigues. Playford's Court Ayres (1655) contains among its 245 pieces eight A–C–S–G groups by William Lawes (apparently), Sandley, John Cobb, George Hudson, John Carwarden, William Gregory and (?Valentine) Oldis. One is preceded by a praeludium, one by a pavan-almaine, and one only is incorporated in a larger series; otherwise, all are set off by a change of key or composer, so that they are clearly recognizable as suites. Yet there is evidence that the jigs (gigues) themselves were not considered a regular part of the suite: the ones attached to the two suites by Lawes were put there by the publisher; moreover, Playford's Masquing Ayres (1662) seems to repudiate the innovation. Of the 100 pieces from 1655, to which 200 new ones were added, there are but four A–C–S–G suites. Five of the above composers and their suites were omitted, the jig was dropped from one of Lawes's suites and another jig was transferred from one suite to a different one.

At this same period, the suite entered English keyboard music in the form of A–C–S groups by Locke (US-NYp Drexel 5611, c1650) and Thomas Strengthfeild (GB-Lbl Add.10337, 1656/7: see Caldwell, 1973, p.153-4), and of A–C–S–G groups (in GB-Llp 1040 and others: see Harley, 1995) by Benjamin Rogers (GB-Och 1236) and Sandley (Musick's Hand-Maide, 1663; the same one that was dropped from Court Ayres). The allemande by Locke ostentatiously mimics the French style brisé, in spite of Locke's recorded contempt for everything French except the occasional courante. His anthology, Melothesia (1673), has a Prelude–A–C–S–G by Locke himself and another with a ‘rant’ in place of the gigue; there is also an A–C–S–G set by Moss. There are other A–C–S–G suites in English sources of the later 17th century by Albertus Bryne (Cooper, MT, 1972), Blow, Francis Forcer and Purcell. Not only was the classical suite with gigue the exception rather than the rule, however, but those that did exist were no more immune from the loss or substitution of members than were the compilations in Court Ayres (see especially Caldwell, 1973, pp.183ff). Babell's collection (GB-Lbl Add.39569; facs. in Gustafson, 1977) consists entirely of suites compiled from the most diverse authors – English, French, Flemish, German. The lute suites in Mace's Musick's Monument (1676) end with a ‘Tattle de Moy’ instead of a gigue; otherwise they are more or less classical. In general, A–C–S, not A–C–S–G, continued to be the most common starting-point for the English suite, but a perusal of the tables of contents of several 17th- and early 18th-century keyboard collections (Caldwell, pp.182ff, 212ff) suggests that suite writing was a distinctly secondary concern of English musicians in the late Baroque period.

Suite, §6: The classical suite after the addition of the gigue

(ii) Germany.

In a magnificent presentation manuscript prepared in Vienna in 1649, along with five A–C–S suites, Froberger included a single A–C–S–G suite, the first that can be dated (for illustration see Froberger). Froberger's suite style was manifestly based on that of French lute music, and his knowledge of Chambonnières’ harpsichord pieces before 1649 is documented, but whether either was the source of his idea of attaching the gigue to A–C–S is unclear. Between 1649 and 1656, when he prepared a second manuscript similar to the first and containing six suites, Froberger spent three years in Brussels, with visits to Paris and London. His acquaintance with the art of the French lutenists and clavecinistes had broadened through personal contacts; his decision to make the gigue a regular part of his suites (five out of six in the new collection) and to move it from last to second place, just after the allemande, had some slight precedent in French music, and his duple-metre gigue notation was normal in French lute music. Still, his music is of a complexity and expressive intensity quite beyond anything French that he could have known, and his cultivation of the suite as a compact, closed unit, often knit more tightly by thematic links among the pieces, was characteristically German, not French.

The A–G–C–S order was remarked on by his contemporary, Matthias Weckmann: ‘NB … Undt so Setzt er Nun fast alle seine Sachen in Solcher Ordnung. NB’ (US-NH Ma.21.H.59; after Riedel, 1960, p.97). It was found unacceptable and changed to A–C–S–G by Froberger's first publishers, Mortier and Roger, in 1697–8 and by Guido Adler 200 years later in DTÖ. Such revisions of the music of a great composer by editors in two different ages are striking proof of the stubborn hold of the classical suite on musical thinking. They serve also as a warning always to view with scepticism the arrangement of suites in sources known to have been prepared outside the control of the composer.

Weckmann wrote two keyboard suites in the A–G–C–S order and two with the gigue at the end, probably in the 1660s (Rampe, 1991). The title of a lost ensemble collection by the Alsatian P.C. Beck (1654) suggests an A–G–C–S core with interpolations and additions, and a surviving one by another Alsatian, J.E. Rieck (1658), has one A–G–C–S–gavotte and two A–C–S–G sequences (one with a gavotte before the gigue), apparently the first German ensemble suites with this order (Whitehead, 1996). During Froberger's lifetime (to 1667), the little keyboard suite writing that there was by composers other than him and Weckmann (e.g. by Kindermann) was on the A–C–S model. The lute collection Delitiae testudinis, published in the year of Froberger's death by Esaias Reusner (ii), consisted mainly of suites with the A–C–S–G core. From then until the end of the century almost every year saw at least one publication of suites built on the classical core for lute, keyboard, ensemble, gamba or violin (not to mention the many manuscripts of uncertain date). By the 1670s ensemble suites with A–C–S–G (usually including added pieces) were outnumbering suites based on A–C–S in this repertory (Whitehead). Chief among the 20 or so composers were J.H. Beck (1666, 1670), Reusner (1668, 1670), J.C. Pezel (1669, 1685), C.H. Abel (1674, 1675, 1677) and Jakob Scheiffelhut (1684, 1685). Unless the A–C–S–G suites of Alessandro Poglietti, J.A. Reincken or others known only in late sources have precedence, the first examples for keyboard and the first keyboard suites of any kind to be printed in Germany were the eight in Benedict Schultheiss's Muth-und Geist-ermunternde Clavierlust (1679–80). Other ‘firsts’ of which only the titles are known are J.P. von Westhoff’s collection of A–S–C–G (the middle dances reversed) for solo violin without bass (1683) and prelude–A–C–S–G suites for gamba by Peter Zachau (1683).

The history of the German classical keyboard suite, so vital to an understanding of Bach, is beset with problems of dating and authenticity. Almost all of Pachelbel's suites have now been relegated to anonymity (Riedel, 1960); two by Buxtehude are really Lebègue's; those of Kerll, Buxtehude, Reincken and Böhm resist dating. Almost the only important milestone after Schultheiss that can be precisely dated is Kuhnau's Neuer Clavier-Übung, 14 Partien that appeared in 1689 and 1692, whose planning and style must have deeply influenced Bach. Johann Krieger's Sechs musicalische Partien (1697) were ‘practically unknown to his contemporaries’ (Riedel). J.C.F. Fischer's Pièces de clavessin (1696) were outside the classical canon, having been inspired by the new Lullian orchestral suites. From the points of view of quantity and consistency of design, the suites of Kuhnau, Buxtehude and Böhm, along with the first publications of Froberger ‘en meilleur ordre’, may be said to have set the classical norm. The departures from the strict sequence of A–C–S–G may be quickly dealt with. Kuhnau's all begin with a prelude or other introduction and some of them close with a substitute for the gigue. In one case the sarabande is replaced by an aria, in one a gavotte is inserted before the gigue, and in several cases dances are provided with doubles. In the case of Buxtehude, three missing gigues and a missing sarabande may be copyist's omissions. The provision of an extra sarabande in four of the suites is unusual. Böhm has but one prelude; there is a gigue missing from one suite and replaced in another. (One of Böhm's suites is in the manner of Fischer.) The total number of almost strictly classical suites by these three composers is about 40, to which the ten engraved ones by Froberger should be added. One may assume that Bach knew most of them. In possibly over half of these suites (it is difficult to be sure in many cases) there is some degree of thematic similarity among the pieces, most often between the allemande and courante, but sometimes extending to the others. It is no wonder that these coherent, disciplined works have lured generations of musicologists into misleading theories about the nature of the suite. The German lutenists after Reusner, J.G. Peyer (c1672), Jacques Bittner (1682), S.L. Weiss (contemporary with Bach) and possibly others (e.g. J.G. Gumprecht) all adhered to the classical suite, as did Konrad Höffler, in 12 suites for gamba and bass (1695).

Suite, §6: The classical suite after the addition of the gigue

(iii) France.

Although the French Baroque suite had its richest development in harpsichord music, the historical importance of that repertory for the development of the suite before 1670 is impossible to assess by any means other than conjecture, because of the lack of earlier dates and of sources in which the pieces are arranged in patterns resembling a suite. It was only two years before his death in 1672 that Chambonnières finally published a selection of 60 of his pieces, arranging them in groups apparently meant as suites, though not so headed. Most are based on the A–C–S core, and two end with a gigue. Many of these pieces must have been composed in the 1640s at the latest, and there is plenty of evidence of their wide and early influence. What is completely unknown, however, is whether they were originally conceived as members of suites, or even whether they ever circulated as such. A slightly more informative situation exists for the works of Chambonnières’ brilliant putative pupil Louis Couperin, whose untimely death in 1661 provides a terminus ad quem for his approximately 135 pieces that is earlier than that of his master. Among them is a unique A–2C–S group that may be in his own hand (G. Oldham's private collection, London) and two further suites (one with gigue) that appear intact in two different late 17th-century sources.

Most of the subsequent harpsichord repertory, beginning with Lebègue's Pièces de clavessin in 1677, was printed (the principal exception being the 237 pieces by J.-N. Geoffroy), and nearly all of it up to the appearance of François Couperin's first book in 1713 was arranged in more or less ‘classical’ suites of greatly varying length and composition. Lebègue's two books furnish a clue to the late acceptance of the term ‘suite’, at least in French publications: in 1677 his suites succeeded one another with no collective headings, while in 1687 – 15 years after Drese's collection – designations such as ‘Suitte En de la ré’ appear to have been added in any available space after the pieces were engraved. Lebègue’s suites (whose notoriety, especially in Germany, exceeded their modest musical interest) – established a kind of loose norm for the French harpsichord suite that lasted until the appearance of François Couperin's first books. An unmeasured prelude – when not supplied, perhaps improvised – was followed by an allemande, usually more than one courante, and a sarabande. Occasionally an extra allemande or sarabande is found, and any of the pieces could be followed by a double. What set the French harpsichord suite apart from the German, besides the multiplication of courantes, was the closing group. instead of finishing their suites with a gigue, sometimes preceded by one or two galanterien, French composers chose three, four or more dances from a list at the top of which stood the gavotte, minuet and gigue, followed by the bourrée, canary, chaconne and others. Gavottes, minuets and sometimes other ‘popular’ dances often came in pairs, and the second of the pair was sometimes in the opposite mode or, rarely, in a different key. A return to the first dance of a pair after the second is occasionally indicated, but there are cases, even when the second piece is in a different mode or key, where a return seems to be ruled out. This pairing of dances, though probably derived from ballroom practice, does not appear before Lebègue, who may thus have been the first to introduce key contrast into the suite. The order within the closing group as well as its size appears to have been arbitrary, and it probably served occasionally as a bin for old pieces; but the last piece, more often than not, was a minuet. German scholars, including Reimann (1940, pp.44–5), have been baffled by the casual French attitude toward the suite, as witness Spitta, complaining about a suite by Marchand consisting of prelude–A–2C–S–G–chaconne–gavotte–minuet: ‘The true idea of concluding with a gigue is either misunderstood or ignored’ (Johann Sebastian Bach, Eng. trans., ii, 86).

This type of suite dominated in the works of Jacquet de La Guerre (1687 and 1707), Geoffroy (manuscript copied after 1694), Louis Marchand (1699 and 1702), Dandrieu (1704–5), Le Roux (1705), Rameau (1706) and Siret (1707/11 and 1719). It also served as a basis for the four published suites of D'Anglebert (1689), whose music constitutes one of the pinnacles of 17th-century keyboard music. In all his suites, D'Anglebert introduced his own transcriptions of other composers' music (see K. Gilbert's edn, Le pupitre, liv, 1975, where D'Anglebert's original music is separated from the transcriptions), and it is impossible to know whether these vast structures, covering from 20 to more than 30 pages in the original edition, were meant for performance at one sitting. The second suite, the longest, is composed as follows: prelude–A–2C–C (Lully)–double–S–S (Lully, Dieu des enfers from La naissance de Venus)–G–G (Lully)–galliard–passacaille–minuet (Lully, La jeune Iris from Trois pour le coucher de roi)–2 gavottes (on traditional airs, Où estes vous allé and Le beau berger Tirsis)–vaudeville (La bergère Anette)–Lully, Overture to La mascarade (Le carnaval)–Lully, Les sourdines from Armide–Lully, Les songes agréables from Atys–Lully, Entrée d'Apollon from Le triomphe de l'amour–Menuet de Poitou–Lully, passacaille from Armide. All of these pieces, including the second gavotte are in G minor. A large manuscript from about 1680 in D'Anglebert's hand (F-Pn Rés.89ter) contains four considerably looser suites in which D'Anglebert's own pieces are outnumbered by the music of other composers, especially arrangements of Ennemond Gaultier's lute pieces. Composite suites like D'Anglebert's are by no means unknown in other French keyboard manuscripts of the period; for example, almost all the 29 suites in Babell's manuscript (see §6(i) above) are made up of pieces by more than one composer. In addition, two lute collections containing pieces by Denis and Ennemond Gaultier were engraved. All these doubtless reflected practical performance traditions.

Although French lutenists played an important role in the dissemination of the A–C–S core, they seem to have been indifferent to the further consolidation of the suite. The two books by Charles Mouton, undated but published probably between 1675 and 1680, consist of keygroups introduced by preludes, but the choice and order of pieces within the groups gives only the barest nod to the classical suite. An engraved book of pieces by Jacques Gallot (c1684) has two similarly loose keygroups of 15 and 16 pieces introduced by preludes. Nearly all the pieces by both composers are the traditional dances, but most of Mouton's and all of Gallot's also bear titles. This practice, rare earlier in French instrumental music, became almost universal in French harpsichord music in the 18th century (Fuller, 1997)

There were two striking (and unexplained) exceptions to the general désinvolture with which the French approached the suite. The first was offered by the earliest collections for the bass viol, for which instrument was compiled (in manuscript) the first dated prelude–A–C–S–G group after Playford's for any medium, and one of the very few French collections all of whose suites were of uniform composition (Du Buisson, 1666, US-Wc M2.1/Book.T2 17C). In 1685, Machy continued with eight suites of prelude–A–C–S–G–gavotte–minuet (the fourth prelude was a chaconne), which were the first printed pieces for the seven-string gamba. After him came Louis Heudelinne with three suites of prelude–A–C–S–G–gavotte (1701). This repertory, long ignored in writings on the suite, was surveyed by Schwendowius (1970). (The most prolific composer for the bass viol, Marin Marais, however, greatly padded and distorted the classical grouping after his first book of 1686.) The second exception was a book of six harpsichord suites of almost identical composition by Dieupart (1701), each beginning with an overture instead of a prelude, and each ending with a gigue preceded by a gavotte and minuet (in one case the minuet was replaced by a passepied). This collection, composed possibly under German influence and published in Amsterdam, was issued simultaneously in a version for flute and violin or figured bass.

Suite, §6: The classical suite after the addition of the gigue

(iv) Low Countries.

The development of the suite in the Low Countries was not unlike that in the surrounding countries, so far as may be seen from the very slim repertory. The ensemble publications of Paulus Matthysz in the 1640s may have inspired Playford's slightly later ones; their contents were similar to contemporary German collections. The Gresse manuscript (last quarter of the 17th century) has Sandley’s A–C–S–G from Musick's Hand-Maide and an anonymous Prelude–A–C–S–G whose pieces are related by head motifs. Bustijn's nine suites (between 1710 and 1716) are more German classical than French, though they do not always end with the gigue. The most significant activity with respect to the suite in the Netherlands was that of the Amsterdam presses, which made possible the wide dissemination of an international repertory for all instruments.

Suite

7. Non-classical suites of the high Baroque.

Except for mid-17th-century French-influenced court dancing and entertainments, the classical suite was primarily a vehicle for solo or chamber music (in the modern sense) during a period of about 125 years beginning in the 1620s. The limitless repertory of suites lying outside the classical canon and fading off to merge with other categories can, paradoxically, be dealt with much more summarily, because the categories and types were a function of application, and their history and morphology were determined by external circumstances. The formation and disappearance of suite types responded to practical, dramatic and musical needs that were (and are) a part of other histories than that of the suite: dancing, ballet and theatre; court and civil entertainment; concert programmes; neo-classicism; and so forth. There can be no question of ‘development’ of the suite across these boundaries, only of bodily transfer, obvious to the observer and needing no discussion. It is a curious fact that with the exception of the classical suite and the suite of branles, no conventional order of pieces ever emerged, even within a single category, so that one can hardly speak even of sub-developments of the non-classical suite as such.

The alternative to an interminable list of particulars is some kind of classification, but this should be regarded as a mere convenience and not as a comprehensive taxonomy. Standing on a middle ground between classical and non-classical suites are those of the French lutenists, which are made of preludes, allemandes, courantes, sarabandes, gigues and other pieces, but in arbitrary and ever-changing sequence. Most of the rest of the middle Baroque non-classical suite repertory is derived in one way or another from ballet. There is a very large category, divisible along national lines, consisting of the instrumental music from actual ballets and related entertainments.

This survives almost entirely in manuscript, and very little of it has appeared in modern editions. Praetorius's Terpsichore, the Philidor collections for France and those of the Schmelzers in Vienna (A-Wn 16583 and 16588) are three of the largest groups of such sources. The Schmelzers, who supplied ballet music for Italian opera in Vienna and for the famous equestrian ballets, often began with an intrada and closed with a retirada, but the dances between varied. Another category (all these are closely related) is made up of collections of instrumental pieces from diverse sources, but especially the operas and ballets of Lully, arranged in arbitrary suites whose pieces were drawn from different works. When such suites begin with an overture, one may speak of a third category; and when new suites were composed expressly in imitation of these, there is another very important category, the ‘overture-suite’, a speciality of the Germans from J.S. Kusser to Telemann. All of this could be and was used as Tafelmusik, but throughout the Baroque period ensemble collections were also expressly designated as music for dining, especially by the Germans, and such collections constitute still another category. Any of these ensemble types could be transferred to the keyboard, either directly, as transcriptions, or indirectly, as new compositions in the same manner. Finally, key groups of pieces with titles and no clear identity as dances could form suites, especially for solo instruments. Often such suites began with an allemande, or even an allemande and a courante, as a kind of gesture to tradition, but continued with character-pieces inspired by the moment.

These classifications are far from mutually exclusive. Biber's Harmonia artificiosa-ariosa (posth.) and Mensa sonora (1680), both collections for entertainment or the table, contain suites whose variety may serve to exemplify many in the latter part of the 17th century. They range from a near-classical arrangement of Sonata–A–C–S–Gavotte–G–Sonatina (a seven-bar ‘conclusion’), and a Viennese ballet type with Intrada–Balletto–Trezza–G–Gavotte–G–Retirada, to a French-inspired Prelude–A–Amener (i.e. branle à mener)–Balletto–G–Ciacona.

Behind much of the kaleidoscopic non-classical suite production of the middle and late Baroque stood the giant figure of Lully. Though Lully himself wrote almost no suites as such (the arbitrary successions of Trois pour le coucher de Roi make no sense as sets), pieces from his stage works were used almost everywhere for the making of suites. It was for Louis XIV himself that the greatest number of these pastiches were assembled, and their remains are in such manuscripts as Suite des symphonies des vieux ballets de M. de Lully … qui se joüent ordinairement entre les actes des comédies chez le roy (1703; F-Pn), containing 22 sets, each beginning with an overture (in spite of the singular form of ‘suite’), and Suite des symphonies et trio de M. de Lully … pour les petits concerts qui se font les soirs devant sa majesté (1713; F-Pc Rés.F 670), containing 66 suites, the titles of which indicate two of the uses to which such suites were put. The works of other composers were used for similar collections (as in F-V Mus.1134–8, which contains no fewer than 835 pieces in 83 suites drawn from André Philidor, one of the Marchands, Lalande, Campra and Charpentier). Lalande's Sinfonies pour les soupez du roy (F-Pc Rés.581) were on the same model; a note to the table of contents explains that all the airs were taken from Lalande's ballets and divertissements. There are 12 ‘suites’, so called, each of which consists of at least two keygroups. The fifth, for example, has Overture–2 airs–Chaconne in B; 3 airs–2S–Grande pièce ou Caprice in G; and Grand air–Loure–Trio de haubois–Dernier air in D.

The first original suites along these lines seem to have come out of Germany, with J.C. Horn's five grand ballets ‘nach der lustigen Französischen Manier’ (1664), Georg Bleyer's Lust-Music (1670), again ‘nach jetziger Französischer Manier’, and most important, the Composition de musique suivant la méthode françoise contenant six ouvertures de théâtre accompagnées de plusieurs airs (1682) by J.S. Kusser, who had lived for six years ‘in intimate friendship’ with Lully. One of the most bizarre figures in the history of the suite requires mention in this context: Gerhard Diessener, who, in works that must have been written between about 1660 and 1673, embodies English, French, German and Italian characteristics in motley profusion. He worked at Kassel during the period when the French musical establishment flourished and the Kassel manuscript was written. An undated English print contains ten suites by him, many beginning with overtures (complete contents in MGG1).

Both Frenchmen and Germans followed these initiatives, including Marais (from 1692), Montéclair and J.-C. Gillier le Fils (1697), Joseph Marchand (1707), L.-A. Dornel (1709) and J.D. Mayer (1682 and 1692), P.H. Erlebach (1693), J.C.F. Fischer and B.A. Aufschnaiter (1695), J.A. Schmierer (1698), Georg Muffat (1695, 8), Kusser again (1700), Johann Fischer (1702–6), Jakob Scheiffelhut (1707). By 1718 Telemann claimed to have composed no fewer than 200 orchestral suites (autobiography), and he had a good deal to say about the origin of these works: he was stimulated by his youthful acquaintance with Handel; he studied the works of Lully and Campra in Sorau, Polish music in Pless, and more of the French style with Pantaleon Hebenstreit in Eisenach. All these ingredients went into the suites, for which his princely employers seem to have had an insatiable appetite.

Suite

8. Couperin and the 18th-century French suite.

The ensemble suites of François Couperin may be divided into three categories: Les nations, which are ordres in Couperin's terminology, combine Italian sonate da chiesa with classical suites à la française, that is, with (in three cases) pieces after the gigue; 12 of the 14 Concerts royaux begin with a prelude, but otherwise vary from classical to quite free (as in no.10, with Prelude–Air tendre–Plainte–La tromba); the remaining two Concerts, nos.8 and 9, and the Apothéoses are theatrical or programme suites. If Couperin had not revealed the history of Les nations (three of the sonatas were written early in his career and the suites added much later), one would suspect a connection with the many German examples of the combination by Rosenmüller, Pezel and others; in fact, they were another of Couperin's exercises in the reconciliation of Italian and French styles.

The ensemble suites were clearly meant to be performed at a single sitting: the Nations at ‘académies de musique’ and ‘concerts particuliers’, with the sonatas serving as ‘introductions’ to the suites, and at least some of the Concerts at chamber concerts for the king during the years 1713–15. The programmes of the two Apothéoses would also have demanded their performance in full. The evidence with regard to the harpsichord music is conflicting, however. On the one hand there is Couperin's statement in the preface to the first book that ‘different occasions’ supplied the ideas for the various pieces, as reflected in the titles. He spoke of ‘pieces’ in his preface, never ‘suites’ or ordres. All the pieces in the first book and most in the second had been written long before the publication of the first book in 1713; six from the first, second and fifth ordres had already been published in an anthology in 1707. In the second book, the ninth ordre begins with an allemande for two harpsichords and continues with nine pieces for a single player, which would seem rather uneconomical planning and it suggests that some ordres were never meant to be played from beginning to end.

On the other hand, Couperin referred in the preface to the fourth book to ‘My original plan, in beginning the 25th ordre’, which may mean that at least this one ordre was conceived as a unit. There is further confirmation of a concern for the ordre as a form in a change of plan that occurred to the composer after he had written the first piece, in C minor. He decided to put the second in E, then return to the tonic. This experiment went awry when the two C minor pieces were lost, so that the ordre as engraved begins out of the main key.

There are but five more or less classical suites in the 27 ordres (in nos.1, 2, 3, 5 and 8, consisting of five to ten pieces each). They are set off from the rest of the ordre by terminology; the dividing line is the end of the dance group and the beginning of the titled pieces. The first ordre, for example, has A–2C–S–Gavotte–G–Minuet and 11 titled pieces in a new style bearing no relation to the traditional dance (on titles and character-pieces, see Fuller, 1997). The fact that the sarabande and gigue bear supplementary titles does not alter the case. Another nine ordres begin with allemandes (sometimes so labelled, sometimes not; some are a special type, apparently invented by Couperin, which begin on the half-bar rather than on the first beat). For at least the first two books, one must assume a prelude as well, chosen from L'art de toucher le clavecin (1716). It is a curiosity of these works that except for the token initial allemandes, there is no middle ground between the ordres with classical suites and those without; no gradual peeling away of the courante, sarabande and gigue. An original feature of four of the free ordres is the programmatic set-within-a-suite: Les petits âges (7), Les fastes de la grande et anciénne Mxnxstrxndxsx (11), Les folies françoises (13), and a group of bird pieces (14). In addition, there are several programmatically linked pairs or groups of three. An exhaustive analysis of the ordres as suites was undertaken by Reimann (1940), who, in effect, gave up on the attempt to make sense of them. The free ordres are original, personal, and inexplicable: the savour is there, but the recipes have been thrown away.

During the 20 years between Couperin's first book and his death, only four Frenchmen published harpsichord collections, but this number was increased to 30 during the following 20 years. Couperin's impact on the traditional suite is nowhere more clearly shown than in the case of Dandrieu, who, after having published two small books (each with one classical suite) and a third (with four non-classical suites of simple teaching pieces) between about 1705 and 1710, began again in 1724, after Couperin's third book had appeared, with a Premier livre (so designated only for its second edition) followed by a Second livre in 1728, both in imitation of Couperin. None of the earlier pieces had titles; all the later ones did, and most were character-pieces in Couperin's new manner with no resemblance to the old dances. Though labelled ‘suite’, almost nothing but a few crypto-sarabandes remained to suggest the classical core. In the first two suites of the Troisième livre, however, an A–C–S beginning is concealed behind the character-title. Both continue with updated versions of pieces from Dandrieu's earliest two books, again with the dance labels suppressed and titles supplied. The remaining six suites consist entirely of ingenious transcriptions of string sonatas in the manner of Corelli composed by Dandrieu in 1705 and 1710, each movement bearing a newly fashionable title. (Unlike Couperin, however, for whom the titles were the generating ideas of the pieces, Dandrieu intended his titles to suggest a style and tempo appropriate to their character.) Rameau’s two collections (1724 and c1728) contain four suites in all. Each book begins with a traditional group: A–C–G (actually a pair of rondeaux) and A–C–S respectively; these suites continue with four or five pieces, the second ending with a brilliant set of variations on a gavotte. The ending groups of each book are free sequences showing little sign of planning. The impact of Rameau's collections was as great as that of Couperin's, but his influence was felt in matters of style rather than suite formations.

The history of French harpsichord music after 1730 is usually presented as one of decline, but inventiveness in suite design went on longer in this repertory than in any other, and it was here that the last collection of Baroque suites was published, apparently in 1772, by Dufour (first name unknown). The idea of Couperin's sets-within-suites was expanded by Dandrieu to include what he called ‘divertissements’ inspired by the theatre; these became very fashionable. Pierre Février (1734) began two of his suites with fugues, the first and last Frenchman to do so. Charles Demars (1735) began some of his with sweeping preludes in a quite un-Gallic manner; in both cases, a Handelian influence probably operated. In 1753, Christophe Moyreau published six vast suites, two in one book, the last four with a book to themselves, suggesting the same architectural approach seen in D'Anglebert. Each suite opens with an overture and two to five of the traditional dances, followed by up to 14 character-pieces, sometimes including a divertissement. Each suite then continues with a second overture, followed by a complete sonata, a concerto, or both. The sonatas were modelled after the Corellian sonata da chiesa and the concertos after late Baroque Italian examples. Key unity was again challenged by Simon Simon (1761): ‘Instead of issuing solo harpsichord suites in the usual way in a single key (which would have caused me to fall into a kind of uniformity and dryness which is better avoided), I thought I ought to compose some with violin accompaniment’. This apparent non sequitur shows that tonal contrast was associated with the accompanied sonata (dating back to Mondonville in 1734), but it does not prepare the reader to find solo suites with key changes, especially a choice such as E minor–G minor–E major. The preference for three-movement groups in this collection, even when the pieces are labelled as dances, is also reminiscent of the accompanied sonata.

The last harpsichord suites, Dufour's, would seem from their contents to be 50 years behind the times: a prelude, a courante, and two each of A–S–G, though not in that order, and the by then usual character-pieces interspersed with minuets. The suites have three to seven pieces, all with the same tonic; and only a pair of ‘concertos’ (which do not change key) at the end seem at all up to date. What is extraordinary, however, is the style – one of the sarabandes, for instance, seems totally devoid of metrical pulse. The French, who probably invented this kind of suite, kept their originality to the end.

Suite

9. Handel and the English suite.

Except for the Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks, and such multi-movement overtures as the one to Rodrigo, Handel's suite writing seems to have been confined to the keyboard. There are about 22 surviving keyboard suites, the exact number depending on the admission of borderline cases. For example, one would be inclined to exclude the second of the ‘Eight Great’, as it is a sonata in everything but name. Another five may have existed at one time in a Swiss collection. Handel has acquired the reputation of a ‘free thinker’ in suite composition. The ‘great’ suites of 1720, all of which are different, only one being classical (no.4), are seen as an inspired synthesis of Italian and German elements in ever-varying balance. Their perfection is said to lie at polar distance from that of Bach (Beck, Eng. trans., 1966, p.64). This view needs revision, though there is space here only for conclusions (for evidence, see the writings of Abraham, 1935, Dale, 1954, Smith, 1954, and Best, 1971).

In fact, Handel seems to have taken little interest in the suite as a form. Basically, his conception was conventional throughout his life. The two suites he wrote for Princess Louise (c1736, Smith; or c1739, Best) are purely classical (A–C–S–G), though their styles are sharply differentiated: he evidently wanted to provide the girl with examples of Italian style versus a second style that he may have thought of as German, French or English. A–C–S–G suites are in a majority among his works, and most of the non-classical ones are pastiches explainable in a variety of ways, but rarely, if ever, as an attempt to manipulate form. It is not paradoxical but logical that Handel should be the great composer whose suites are most often unified by thematic means: his technique verged on laziness, and Dale (1954 p.240) was right to point out the risks of monotony he ran in taking the materials of his allemandes into his courantes in so obvious a manner.

The only suite composed almost entirely for the 1720 collection is no.3 in D minor, and it is one of Handel's best. The allemande and courante are related, but masterfully, the most inspired touch being the courante's forthright correction of the ‘soft’ C in the first bar of the allemande. The air is second-hand, but the new finale was based on its first bar, giving two thematically related pairs. In general, the 1720 collection seems to have been put together from the best pieces, not suites, which already existed; the new additions (with the exception of no.3) were all introductory movements ‘to make the Work more useful’, that is, to give weight and scale to small groups.

The direct influence of Handel's suites on English keyboard music was slight, though it can be traced in Thomas Chilcot’s suites of 1734 (Caldwell, 1973) and those of J.C. Smith. There were other influences as well: one of Dieupart’s suites, without its overture, was published by Walsh in 1705; the others were probably also known through the composer's teaching activities in England. G.B. Draghi’s Six Select Sutes (sic) appeared in 1707, a suite by Alexander Maasmann, about 1715, and about the same time a set of six by J.B. Loeillet which perhaps reflected Dieupart's influence, since all have A–C–S–aria/gavotte–minuet–G. Henry Symonds was more varied but equally systematic in his Six Sets of Lessons (1733), which contained four A–C–S–gavotte–minuet–G, two with preludes, and two ‘sonatas’. The influence of the Italian sonata da camera was felt more and more strongly in English harpsichord music beginning, perhaps, with Richard Jones (1732) and continuing with James Nares, Barnabas Gunn and John Jones. (The final victory of the sonata in England is described briefly in §1 above.)

Suite

10. Bach and the Germans.

Bach wrote about 45 suites, setting in them such a standard as to compel all others to be measured against it. They may be surveyed quickly in order of diminishing ‘classicism’. At the top are the six cello suites, prelude–A–C–S–X–G, where X is a pair of minuets in the first two, a pair of bourrées in the second two and a pair of gavottes in the last two. Unification among the pieces, obvious in no.3, moves from subtlety to concealment (or non-existence) in no.5, whose allemande and gigue, however, quote the F minor Suite of Gaspard Le Roux, one of the French composers whose music Bach possessed. The next set in the hierarchy, the English suites, begins with another, more extensive quotation from Le Roux, this time the gigue from his A major suite. Dannreuther (Musical Ornamentation, 1893–5) discovered a resemblance between Bach's prelude and a Dieupart gigue, but the resemblance to Le Roux is even closer. Again the scheme is prelude–A–C–S–X–G, but the variations are slightly less mechanical: Suite no.1 has a second courante with two doubles, nos.2, 3 and 6 have doubles for the sarabandes, and although the X's are still all pairs, the repertory is enlarged to include the passepied. The opening bars of A, C, S and G of no.5 in E minor are characterized by a descending scale motif; whether there was a conscious intent to relate the pieces is impossible to say. Except for this, unification is not a feature of the set.

The French suites have no preludes and a varying number of pieces between the sarabande and gigue (one in no.1 and four in no.6). There are no obvious thematic links between the pieces, though Beck (p.59) showed motivic resemblances in no.1, and Pearl (1957, p.265) in no.3. For as long as discussion of Bach's suites goes on, there will be new proposals to explain why these two sets are called ‘English’ and ‘French’. It is possible that whoever attached the labels (it was not Bach) had something definite in mind, but it is certainly not evident in the styles or forms of either collection, unless it is the borrowing from Le Roux, which would make the English suites French. Forkel said the English suites were written for an Englishman; J.C. Bach's copy had ‘fait pour les anglois’ at the head of Suite no.1. Possibly the other set was called French simply to distinguish it from the English suites.

The climax of Bach's mastery of the suite was reached in the six harpsichord partitas. The forms introduce modest liberties by comparison with the French suites: the fourth and sixth have an aria and an air respectively before the sarabande: the second ends with a capriccio instead of a gigue; and the repertory of inserted pieces further expands to include a burlesca, a scherzo and a rondeau. The sarabande of the Sixth Partita recalls the opening toccata, but in general, thematic connections among the pieces are far from obvious. Pearl claimed intricate but very subtle interrelationships within the partitas in C minor and G major, but such connections are much stronger among the pieces of the solo violin partitas in B minor and D minor. There they are a matter of similar harmonic progressions, similar melodic contours (when stripped of ornament), and similar emphasized scale degrees, all in the first few bars of each piece, where the effect of recall is the most powerful. Each of the three violin partitas is intentionally different: the first has a bourrée instead of a gigue and brilliant doubles to each dance; in the second, the A–C–S–G are hardly more than a composite prelude to the gigantic chaconne; and the last is a piece of Tafelmusik (Preludio–Loure–Gavotte en rondeau–a pair of minuets–Bourrée–Gigue).

The qualities that set Bach’s suites apart from all others have nothing to do, strictly speaking, with the history of the suite. The choice of pieces, their order and any techniques of unification all have their precedents and counterparts. What is unique is Bach's use of the suite as a building-block in a larger structure, not the same thing as Machy's or Dieupart's stringing together six nearly identical suites. It is a matter of arranging each suite to do something different – or the same thing in a different way – so that the set as a whole becomes a kind of thesaurus of the suite for that particular medium. This encyclopedic approach is clearest in the varied introductions to the keyboard partitas and is essentially didactic. Another quality is Bach's tendency to mask the identity of a genre with writing that is texturally complex and technically demanding. The sarabande of the Partita in E minor, for example, challenges the player's ability to project the underlying melody and pulse. A third is the tendency to make exercises out of pieces. Thus one suspects, though there is no real evidence, that at least the last three pieces of the Sixth Partita are exercises in notational problems: sheer complexity in the sarabande; the assimilation of duple notation to triple movement in the gavotte; and the proper rhythmic interpretation of a gigue in binary rhythm.

The four orchestral suites were not conceived as a set and were written more for public entertainment than for personal edification. They take their place among the vast repertory of non-classical suites produced in Germany during the first half of the 18th century. A manuscript in the library of the Thomasschule, Leipzig, contains two dozen overture suites by J.F. Fasch, C.H. Förster, Schneider, Hasse, J.G. Wiedner, J.N. Tischer and Fuchs (?Fux). Other composers in this generation are J. Ludwig Bach, J. Bernhard Bach, probably Pantaleon Hebenstreit (though the authenticity of a collection of suites attributed to him has been questioned), Heinichen, Kuntzen, Johann Pfeiffer and J.D. Zelenka. The most prolific were Graupner, with 87 surviving orchestral suites, and again Telemann, whose total output in this form is put at something approaching 1000 by Büttner; 135 have survived (Hoffmann, 1969). This extraordinary fecundity in a foreign form was, of course, a perfect example of the effect of the fragmentation of the Empire on art: the ordinary demands of court music were multiplied by tens and hundreds.

Classical suites were written by the keyboard composers J.M. Leffloth and Vincent Lübeck (1728), Gottlieb Muffat and J.P. Kellner (1739), Krebs (1745), and especially Graupner, whose 57 Partien span the years from 1718 to about 1740. Freer keyboard suites, influenced by the orchestra suite or (occasionally) the sonata da camera, and sometimes called Galanterien-Partien, came from F.A. Maichelbeck and J.C.F. Fischer (1736), F.A. Hugl (1738). J.N. Tischer, Isfrid Kayser and Trippenbach (1746) and J.P. Kellner (1752).

The German lutenists were among the last to relinquish the suite, Silvius Weiss, J.M. Conradi, David Kellner, Adam Falckenhagen and others continuing to write them until mid-century. One of the last uses of the suite in Germany, as in France (see §1 above), was in anthologies, as a convenience in arranging the contents, and probably as a suggestion to the player how to make little programmes. Marpurg's Raccolta delle più nuove compositioni (1756) was the first of a projected yearly anthology whose purpose was ‘to please everyone’, and to this end mingled French, Italian and German pieces in all forms, both vocal and instrumental. The contents of each volume were divided into 12 suites, called Partita. For example, no.7 of 1756 had a gavotte in A major (Seyffarth), a pair of minuets in A minor and a rondeau in A minor (C.P.E. Bach).

Suite

11. 1750–1900.

The disappearance of the suite in the second half of the 18th century was a matter of several quite independent processes. It was the sonata, symphony and concerto that ultimately filled the functions vacated by the suite; and where composers had been writing both suites and the newer types, making a clear distinction, they simply stopped writing suites and went on with the others. More commonly, however, the suite itself began to undergo modifications and experiments. If the number of pieces was reduced to three, say, A–S–G, and the first two provided with Italian tempo marks instead of the dance titles, the resemblance to a sonata was close – still closer if the sarabande was in a contrasting key. This happened in certain cases – for example, the music of Simon – and it may be seen in the three-movement layout associated with the accompanied sonatas in Jacques Duphly's third harpsichord book (1756), where accompanied ‘sonatas’ (unlabelled) form part of larger suites. Under the influence of the sonata da camera, abstract movements began to appear in suites in positions other than that of the first piece; another way of putting it would be to say that sonate da camera began to appear masquerading as suites, as in Handel's second ‘great’ suite. In orchestral music, the overture, sinfonia and suite overlapped in internal arrangement and terminology, producing an anarchic situation from which the symphony emerged the victor. In England the process was curiously incomplete: the music changed, but the old term, ‘overture’, persisted.

In Vienna the transition from suite to sonata took place behind the screen of the various terms for entertainment music: divertimento, serenade, cassation, partita and notturno (Webster, 1974; Finscher, 1988). The term ‘divertimento’, which was the preferred one for any non-orchestral ensemble piece, light or serious, between 1750 and 1780, overlapped with ‘partita’, which was a similarly general designation up to about 1760. Both could be used for keyboard music as well; ‘divertimento’ carried no implication regarding the number or order of movements or the key-scheme (see Finscher for a qualified view). In the earlier part of the century the usual influences had been felt in the Parthien: those of the French lutenists in the Lauthenkonzert (Jacques de Saint-Luc, J.B. Weichenberger, Hinterleithner and others), and that of Lully in the Muffats. But the old suite was never a favourite vehicle in Austria, and the quantity necessary for statistical observations seems not to have been produced.

The Viennese were much more interested in a genre which has been arbitrarily excluded from consideration here: the sets of ballroom dances which Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Dittersdorf, Hummel and many others wrote for the annual fancy-dress balls to benefit the Pensionsgesellschaft Bildender Künstler, and for other occasions. Many of these sets of six or 12 dances were organized on symmetrical key-schemes and some had codas. A remote connection with the suite was suggested by Schindler, who referred to Beethoven's Mödlinger Tänze as ‘einige Partien Walzer’. The Strauss waltz cycles are the offspring of these sets.

Although the suite survived after 1800 in ballet, incidental music, periodical anthologies, potpourris and military music, the word itself had acquired strong classical (A–C–S–G) associations, so that in dictionaries and ordinary musical thinking of the period the entire concept was regarded as something that belonged to the past. This did not prevent the proliferation of sets of pieces meant to be performed at a sitting; it simply released them from a generic term and from the conventions associated with it. To write a ‘suite’ then became an exercise in an archaic form, as it was with Mozart's k399/385i, inspired by the Bach and Handel concerts at Baron van Swieten's home in 1782. The introduction, which is a prelude and fugue foreshadowing the great fantasia for automatic organ k608, runs into the allemande without a break. The work remained a torso, and the experiment seems not to have been repeated for half a century.

Freed from a priori conceptions of what the form ought to be, at least one composer, Schumann, appears to have seized the idea of the suite as a way of combining a number of small romantic gestures into a larger whole, with no inherited restrictions inhibiting their more subjective interrelations. To a greater degree than in any other composite form, the resulting structures were determined and generated by the materials themselves, and the suites made out of them differed utterly from one another. Possibly such a set as Beethoven's op.126 Bagatelles served Schumann as a model, but more likely is the example of the song cycle, in which the ultimate unifying force is the poetic idea, and the freedom to invent musical interrelations is absolute. Papillons, Kreisleriana, Carnaval, Faschingsschwank aus Wien and the others (not all the Schumann piano sets are units, however) are too varied and too few to furnish the basis for any classification system. None of them is called a suite, but one can perhaps guess at Schumann's reaction to being told they were suites from his remark in the review of William Sterndale Bennett's Suite de pièces op.24 (1842) quoted in §1 above. Sterndale Bennett's work (the English seem to have been pioneers of the suite in the 19th century as well as the 17th) is in six movements with Italian tempo headings (in MB, xxxvii, 1972).

A curious link between the suite and the song cycle is afforded by Joachim Raff's Die schöne Müllerin, a work for string quartet in six movements whose four-hand piano arrangement is called ‘suite’. The same work provides a link with a third genre through its sub-title, Cyklische Tondichtung; in fact, the historical continuum between the orchestral programme suite and the programme symphony, via the symphonic poem in several titled movements, admits no division into separate genres except on the basis of the composers’ terminology. The first and only systematic attempts to revive the suite as an alternative to the sonata and symphony were made between about 1857 and 1880, by Franz Lachner and Raff. If Raff's Italian Suite in E minor was written ‘during his time at Weimar’, that is, before 1856 (Riemann, Geschichte der Musik seit Beethoven, 1901, p.429), this would make it among the earliest. Raff's suites, which number over a dozen, were written for a wide variety of media: piano, orchestra, piano and orchestra, violin and piano, violin and orchestra, and quartet; at least nine of these were also arranged for piano duet. They have four to seven titled movements in a variety of key-schemes, and all the usual Baroque types appear interspersed with more up-to-date pieces such as moto perpetuo, Rhapsodie and Romanze. Occasionally a suite is nothing but a sonata under another name (e.g. op.162 for piano, 1870–71, whose movements are Elegie in Sonatenform, Volkslied mit Variationen, Ländler, Märchen).

Close to the time when Raff wrote his first suite Woldemar Bargiel brought out his Piano Suite op.7, as well as a number of sets of character-pieces undesignated as suites. Another group were the eight orchestral suites by Lachner (1861–81). Here also, the movements were titled and each suite had its sarabande, gigue, minuet and so on; but the distinction between suite and symphony was sometimes arbitrary. Suite no.1, op.113 (1861), for example, has Praeludium, Menuet, Variationen und Marsch (there are 23 variations) and Introduction und Fuge, which is suite-like enough until one discovers that the first movement is in full sonata form with a repeated exposition. Another Praeludium is a sonata-form piece in French overture style. Among the few suites by J.G. Rheinberger is one for the unusual combination of organ, violin and cello (Con moto, Thema mit Veränderungen Saraband-trio, Finale).

Saint-Saëns seems to have been one of the first to follow Sterndale Bennett with a suite (1866), so designated, which was free from dances or other echoes of the 18th century. It is a big virtuoso work for cello and piano, consisting of a perpetual-motion prelude (D minor), serenade (G minor), scherzo (E major), romance (E major) and finale (D major). Op.49 (1877) for orchestra and op.90 (1892) for piano both introduce two or three of the old dances, while op.60 (1881), the Suite algérienne, is a programme suite with Prélude, Rhapsodie mauresque, Rêverie du soir and Marche militaire française. By 1880 the suite was no longer a curiosity in France, and Massenet had begun his series of nine orchestral suites, most of them programmatic and the last two with singers and a speaker. During the last decades of the century, composers of peripheral countries (especially northern ones) found the suite a congenial form for music of an exotic or nationalistic flavour (Grieg, Asger Hamerik, N.V. Gade, Sibelius, Nielsen, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov and MacDowell).

The suite of extracts had since the 17th century always been a major ingredient of the concert repertory; it continued thus throughout the 19th century (e.g. Schumann's Manfred, poème dramatique: fragments disposés en suite d'orchestre) and remains so in the 20th. Such suites are extracted by the composer himself or by anyone who can secure the right to do so. The pieces, if suitable (as may happen with a ballet), can simply be selected and reproduced without alteration. If there are voice parts these can be removed or worked into the instrumental texture. The keys may be changed, the medium changed (as with a piano reduction, for example), the pieces shortened, run together or provided with bridges between them, introductions and conclusions added – in effect the whole thing may be rewritten. A familiar example is Stravinsky's Pulcinella, in which a subtle stylistic transformation takes place in addition to the other liberties.

Suite

12. 20th century.

The factors which led to the re-emergence of the suite as a major form in the 20th century had all appeared by the end of the 19th: the historicism, the nationalism, the urge to experiment, the academic associations of sonata and symphony, and, in the case of extract suites, the expediency. But after the turn of the century, every one of these factors intensified. Musicology began to bring to light some of the vast forgotten suite literature of the Baroque period, and the winds of neo-classicism (which more often meant neo-Baroque style) began to blow away the Wagnerian mists. The breakdown of the tonal system in certain circles discouraged sonata writing, and the search for new styles and forms became ever more conscious and systematic. Finally, the ‘market’ for music increased exponentially for well-known reasons.

For a time the suite à l’antique enjoyed a considerable vogue among composers, including Hindemith (after Gervaise), Strauss (after Couperin), Egk (after Rameau), Stravinsky (after pseudo-Pergolesi), Schoenberg, Debussy and Respighi, to name only a few. At the other end of the stylistic spectrum were the ‘characteristic’ suites, which continued the late 19th-century tradition of nationalistic and ‘geographical’ suites. These programme suites are most often for orchestra and range in tone from serious (e.g. Holst's The Planets) to the frankly popular (e.g. Grofé's Grand Canyon Suite). They have a function analogous to that of extract suites, and one type merges into the other. The satirical and parodic ‘divertimento’ for flute, violin, percussion and piano by Donald Martino, From the Other Side (1988), is a late manifestation of the characteristic suite. Its movements are Introduction and Slow Dance, Tango dei Grulli, Dance of the Reluctant Flamapoo, Ballad for Blue Bill, and Das magische Kabarett des Doktor Schönberg.

But it was neither the antique suite, the characteristic suite, nor the extract suite which became the vehicle for the most advanced and original contributions of the 20th century. These three types were recognizable as suites and were often even entitled suites. As such they had associations unattractive to a composer determined (as many in the 20th century have been) not to be derivative. It was the suite idea, unrecognized (or differently named) and consequently free, that underlay the originality of, for example, Lawes, Couperin and Schumann and that has served and continues to serve composers whose ideas result in sets of pieces meant to be performed at a sitting. As Beck remarked in the case of Schumann: ‘What are these if they are not suites?’. One of the first in the 20th century to make the set of pieces his own was Satie; Chapitres tournés en tous sens (1913) will have to serve as one example for many. But throughout the first 75 years of the 20th century the suite has served composers in many ways and for many reasons: Schoenberg's Five Orchestral Pieces (1909) at one end of the period and David Felder’s Three Pieces for Orchestra (1995) at the other frame a multitude of works in which the relationship of the parts to the whole is newly worked out in each. Ample scope remains for the investigation of this repertory from the standpoint of the history of musical sets.

In contrast to the postmodern, playful mixing of styles and cultures evident in Martino's work, Helmut Lachenmann's Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied (1979–80) might be interpreted as a ‘dying ember of the modernist project’: the work is entirely serious and there is little that is playful in the way the suite comes into full collision with Lachenmann's withering critical intent. In this work Lachenmann, who viewed the suite along with much of classical music as an empty husk in the service of a repressive political and social system, ‘deconstructed’ the old form in order to materialize – or perhaps better, dramatize – the contradictions contained within it (J. Stadelman). Hans Zeller's notes to a recording of Lachenmann's piece suggest that the work is the composer's critical compositional reaction to the ‘politics of form’ as it pertains to the suite, and they provide a fitting conclusion to the genre’s late 20th-century history: ‘The term “dance suite” stands not only for the centuries-old tradition of suite-composers but for the familiar per se, for dance gestures and forms of music making … which embody a sense of collective security and provide a haven for bourgeois thought and sensibility as well as their fetishes: native land, religious bonds, national holidays, traditions, yearning for childhood’.

Suite

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ApelG

BrownI

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MGG2

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J.-L. Gester: ‘Die Instrumentalsuite in Strassburg um den dreissigjährigen Krieg, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Suiten für zwei und drei Violinen, Violon und Basso Continuo von Johann Ernst Rieck (Strasburg, 1658)’, Mitteilung der Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Mittelrheinische Musikgeschichte, lix (1992), 355–62

T. Schipperges: ‘Suite’ (1992), HMT

D.J. Buch: Dance Music from the ‘Ballets de Cour’ 1575–1651 (Stuyvesant, NY, 1993)

J. Harley: ‘An Early Source of the English Keyboard Suite’, RMARC, no.28 (1995), 51–8

P. Whitehead: Austro-German Printed Sources of Instrumental Ensemble Music, 1630–1700 (diss., U. of Pennsylvania, 1996)

Die Entwicklung der Ouvertüren-Suite im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert: Michaelstein 1993, ed. G. Fleischhauer and others (Michaelstein, 1996)

D. Fuller: ‘Of Portraits, “Sapho” and Couperin: Titles and Characters in French Instrumental Music of the High Baroque’, ML, lviii (1997), 149–74