Harpsichord Concerto No. 1 in D minor, BWV 1052 // J. S. Bach

Learn to play the songs you love: Bach scholarship generally assumes this harpsichord concerto is based on a lost violin concerto by Bach, because, as John Butt writes: “it contains many passages suggestive of string-crossing and of figuration based around open strings.“ Butt adds: “if this is indeed the case, it [was] Bach’s most virtuoso violin concerto,“ which is “generally assumed to have been a very early concerto.“ Nonetheless, both Butt and Peter Wollny have suggested the possibility that there was no violin original, and instead that, to quote Wollny, “one cannot but conclude that the work was conceived from the outset for keyboard instrument ... many features of this composition – including the repeated intrusion of the solo part into the tutti sections – can only be explained if one starts from the fundamental precedence of the keyboard instrument.“ Wollny qualifies the violin concerto reconstruction attempts as u