Bach for More—Violist Edward Klorman Offers a Valuable New Installment in Cello Suites Scholarship

By Miranda Wilson | From the November/December 2025 issue of Strings

Bach’s Cello Suites, BWV 1007–1012, are more than rites of passage and lifelong companions for cellists—in the popular imagination, they practically define what it means to play the instrument. They’re some of the best-known, oftenest-played, most-researched works in the repertoire. This being the case, it’s not surprising that there are already many books about them. Steven Isserlis’ The Bach Cello Suites: A Companion engages with the Suites from the perspective of an international soloist who has performed them hundreds of times. Allen Winold’s Bach’s Cello Suites: Analyses and Explorations brings a theorist’s scrutiny to the musical language and formal structures of every movement. David Ledbetter’s Unaccompanied Bach: Performing the Solo Works, though not exclusively about the Cello Suites, traces their lineage of influences, styles, and forms. Andrew Talle’s introduction to Bärenreiter’s synoptic edition of early source materials is required reading for anyone who enjoys musicological detective work. Eric Siblin’s The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece weaves together multiple narratives about the Suites, jumping back and forth across centuries and continents. Full disclosure: I wrote a book about them myself (The Well-Tempered Cello: Life with Bach’s Cello Suites). Given that these beloved works are so well-documented, what can possibly remain to be said about them? 

To find out, I spoke to Edward Klorman, a professor of music theory at the University of Wisconsin’s Mead Witter School of Music, about his latest book, Bach: The Cello Suites (New Cambridge Music Handbooks Series, 2025). 

“I wanted to write a book that could be read by anybody who plays these pieces,” he tells me. “Cellists. Violists. Bassists. Trombonists. Whoever!” A secondary motivation was to dispel a few misunderstandings about the Cello Suites that just won’t go away. “There’s a lot of lore about them, a lot of mystique . . . and the lore has a long tail.” 

One of the myths most in need of debunking is the often-repeated story that Pablo Casals “rediscovered” the Cello Suites, rescuing them from obscurity. For many string players, this narrative remains a given. But if it were true, why are there so many 19th-century editions from long before Casals’ time? “Someone must have been playing from them,” Klorman agrees. Bach: The Cello Suites shows side-by-side comparisons of 19th-century editions, from the earliest publications by Louis Norblin and Justus Johann Friedrich Dotzauer to more radical takes on Bach, such as Friedrich Grützmacher’s so-called “performance edition” (in reality, more of an arrangement) and a few editions by musicians who felt the need to add piano accompaniments. This alone would make Klorman’s work fascinating to cello history nerds, but there’s more: He also painstakingly researches and chronicles the performance and reception histories of the Cello Suites, digging up concert reviews, sheet music catalogs, conservatory syllabi, and obscure journals. There are cameos from just about every top cellist of the 19th century.  

“I was surprised just how much evidence there is of performances and critical response from the late 1850s,” Klorman says. “And not just in Germany, but also in England. The Suites were integrated into conservatory curricula as far away as California. The history of these pieces spreading from Germany to other places starts a lot earlier than I thought it did.” This said, he is quick to credit Casals with a dominating role in the performance history of the Suites. “He was certainly one of the first to play them regularly, and to establish the idea that a serious cellist should know all six, and that if you’re going to perform Bach, it should be a complete Suite with all the repeats.” 

Another unquestioned (though questionable) assumption Klorman challenges is the received wisdom that Anna Magdalena Bach’s copy, known to scholars as Source A, is the closest we can get to Bach’s long-lost autograph. Some cellists—most famously Anner Bylsma, whose books and recordings treat Source A’s notes and bowings as infallible—have taken this view to extremes. In recent years, Source B, the copy by Johann Peter Kellner, has received more serious consideration by performers, but Sources C and D—the work of later 18th-century copyists—remain comparatively neglected. 

“There’s been a big focus on Magdalena since the 19th century,” Klorman says, “with little attention to the later sources. I wanted to share Andrew Talle’s thinking about why those may possibly be our best sources. Talle has written about the discovery of the copyist of the first half of Source C, knowing the exemplar they were working from was a manuscript that Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach treasured and considered to be useful. Sources C and D are the only copies made by professional copyists working carefully. For all her musicianship, Magdalena was not a professional copyist or a string player.” 

Taking this into account, how might today’s cellists (and violists) play the Suites differently if we stopped thinking of Source A as the be all and end all? For Klorman, the difference might be in the ornamentation. “There are ornaments in the later manuscripts that are missing in the earlier ones [Sources A and B],” he says. “Talle says enough of them are consistent to suggest that they come from a common ancestor source. It could only have been the composer.” So the idea of Source A being “inerrant,” because of the copyist’s proximity to Bach, might not be faithful to his intentions at all? Klorman doesn’t think so. “Bach routinely returned to pieces to add and refine things, or clarify things, or even tailor things. That would be a very 18th-century way of thinking about it.”

When I started reading Klorman’s book, I assumed he must be a fellow cellist, and I was surprised to learn that in addition to his theory credentials, he’s a violist of some renown. He’s played Bach all his life and knows the Suites as well as any Bach-obsessed cellist. What would he say to those who consider them “sacred texts” that should be exclusively reserved for cellists? Is it acceptable to play them on other instruments? 

“My instrument isn’t the one that is designed to do the things these pieces call on us to do,” Klorman admits. “I wonder if there might be a more liberating way to look at it, more of an 18th-century way, which is that how music was conceived wasn’t necessarily tied so closely to one specific instrument. We all know that Bach transcribed this music for lute. It’s a different kind of instrument, but he took pains to make it idiomatic for that instrument. It’s not a sustaining instrument, so there’s more ornamentation to fill in what could have been longer notes on the cello. With viola, we should find ways that are idiomatic to our own playing style. I was very excited to find evidence of a performance of at least one movement on viola in the 1860s, about as early as people were playing them on the cello.” 

How do violists get around the challenges of music that’s playable on the cello, but not on the viola? “The two big issues would be Suite No. 5—do we use standard tuning or scordatura?—and the Sixth Suite, which would be rare to play in D major in the equivalent of thumb position,” Klorman says. “It’s almost impossible on viola, so most violists transpose it to G major. Bach would not have considered that unsatisfactory, because when he transcribed pieces, he would transpose them into an appropriate tessitura for the instrument. He wouldn’t have any compunction about doing it in G major.” Klorman’s performance history of the Suites includes violists such as Lillian Fuchs, whose pioneering performances and recordings led the great Casals himself to exclaim that “On the viola, it sounds . . . better!!!!”

Anyone who still objects to the Cello Suites being played on an instrument other than the cello should consider Klorman’s point that what Bach thought of as a cello may not correspond to the present-day meaning of the word. There is, in fact, considerable debate about the specifics of the instrument Bach had in mind for the Suites, since instrument definitions (and sizes, and string tunings, and instrument holds, and bow holds) were much more fluid concepts 300 years ago. Recent scholarship suggests that Bach might have intended them for a viola da spalla, a smaller cello held on the shoulder with the aid of a strap—an “upside down” position from the present-day cello hold. Others have proposed that Bach might have expected the cellists to play using a viola da gamba–style underhand bow hold, another “upside-down” aspect for us to work with as we reconsider what it means to play Bach in a historically informed manner.

These suggestions epitomize what Bach: The Cello Suites does that other research on the subject hasn’t: It turns things on their heads. Klorman’s erudite but binge-readable work makes us reconsider Bach’s work from a fresh perspective. In the final chapter, he explores the continuing evolution of the Suites in the present-day imagination, chronicling the new art they have inspired across decades and continents, from film and television soundtracks to pop songs and commercials. As Klorman observes, the homemade Bach recordings that dozens of musicians uploaded to social media during the Covid-19 pandemic were one of the things that kept us all going at that devastating time. This must-read book shows that Bach’s Cello Suites will continue to have a hold on our imaginations for many years to come.