the Bach wars

Haverstick here...I must confess that I am greatly enjoying the
ongoing Bach debate...Bach is a personal favorite of mine, and I feel
that he is the greatest "western" composer to date. While I do not have
the scholarly background of a lot of the folks on the forum, I
nonetheless have a great curiosity to learn as much as possible about
subjects that interest me. Thus, I want to pose a few questions
regarding the great German, and hopefully some of you real smart types
out there will further my education by your answers. Here goes...
1. Since Bach called his great keyboard work "The Well Tempered
Clavichord" (or was it Clavier?), wouldn't that imply that it was
composed in well, not equal, temperament? Am I overlooking something
here? 2. Bach composed a number of works for lute, and was, I have read,
friends with the great lutenist Sylvius Leopold Weiss ( they supposedly
jammed together on one occasion)...I am supposing lutes were tuned in
equal temperament, since they had straight, not staggered, frets, and
I am thus assuming that Bach composed these works in equal
temperament...am I in the ballpark? 3. Bach composed a number of solo
violin and cello suites...since these were for unaccompanied
instruments, could the performers have used pure intervals when they
played them? Or, since some of the pieces had chords in them, which must
be next to impossible to finger on these instruments, were they meant to
be equal tempered as well? Would a performer back then ever mix
temperaments in a performance (of course, I mean in a solo work)?
I get a feeling from Bach that he was a practical man, and that the
ideas he presented in his works were the most important issue, not the
execution, per se. In other words, the aforementioned solo violin pieces
are so difficult on violin (and so much more playable on guitar, for
example) that one wonders why he wrote them for this instrument in the
first place. Perhaps his inner world was so rich in musical voices that
he didn't really care about the medium on which these ideas were
expressed.
Of course, we're all supposing, to one degree or another, just what
happened back then, but it is fun to speculate. I am looking forward to
some responses to my questions, so have at it...and don't forget to come
to Denver for the MICROSTOCK festival on October 21st...see you, Hstick

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