CIRCUMSTANCES SURROUNDING THE COMPOSITION of the last of the French Suites are not known, though it seems likely that it was written around 1725, somewhat later than the early versions of the first five, which are contained in the Clavierbüchlein for Anna Magdalena Bach (1722–25). The Urtext of the New Bach Edition presents us with two versions of the six, one based on a copy in the hand of Bach's student and son-in-law, Johann Christoph Altnickol, and a second one assembled from various later sources, including a manuscript in the hand of another Bach student, Heinrich Nicolas Gerber. An intriguing feature of the Gerber version of the last suite is the inclusion of the Prelude in E Major (BWV 854/1) from The Well-Tempered Clavier I, suggesting that Bach might originally have intended this work to be one of the suites with preludes. Unless further documentation is uncovered, the reason for Gerber's inclusion of the Prelude will remain speculative, though it seems likely that the idea must have originated with the composer. Perhaps Gerber heard Bach play the suite that way. Consider the following description of the elder Gerber's studies published by his son some years later in his Lexicon der Tonkünstler.

This account does not say that Bach played the suites for his student, only the Well-Tempered Clavier, though it is not much of a stretch of the imagination to suppose that he might have done so. In any case we do know from this quote that he had the elder Gerber study a series of suites somewhere along the way, and it must have been through those studies that he encountered the E-major suite in this fashion.