The Well-tempered Clavier (Book I): Prelude and Fugue No. 3

The Well-Tempered Clavier, BWV –, is a collection of two sets of preludes and fugues in . The C♯ major prelude and fugue in book one was originally in C major all keys (although the music was not yet tonal in the modern sense of the word): . 3 beats per second) and between the fifth C–G and the third C–E (c.
Table of contents

• Bach - WTC - Prelude and Fugue No.3 in C sharp major (BWV 848)
• Prelude and Fugue in C-sharp major, BWV 848 (Bach, Johann Sebastian)
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• Work “The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I: Prelude and Fugue no. 1 in C major, BWV ” - MusicBrainz

The C-Major Prelude, famous for its naive beauty, and for the fact that nearly every piano student takes a crack at it sometime in their studies, is actually an almost ironic outlier in a collection of polyphonic works. It is not immediately polyphonic though it can be strongly argued that there are indeed five voices from start to finish , and it is even devoid of a theme. At first glance it is nothing but a series of arpeggiated chords around a nice, but not especially daring, harmonic progression in C Major.

The subtle beauty of the music is undeniable, though, and it stands out through the whole of music history as distinctly recognisable and endearing, which is an excellent way to start off the monumental achievement of The Well-Tempered Clavier. The first fugue in the Well-Tempered Clavier is a beautiful introduction to the world of Bach's fugues. A fugue is a style of musical composition where a Theme melody is introduced, and then repeated in one or more other voices. This is in contrast to modern songs which have a melody, usually sung or played by one voice, chords, and rhythm.

This is what the theme of this fugue looks like:. In the first section of the fugue, each of the four voices introduces the theme, starting on a different note. In this section, the theme never overlaps itself. After all four voices have entered with the theme, Bach starts making things more interesting, and voices start playing the theme so that it overlaps with other voices.

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When the theme entrances overlap, this is called stretto. As you watch, you'll see that Bach uses stretto more and more, which heightens the tension of the piece.

The theme occurs 24 times in this fugue. Bach loved numbers, symbolism, and symmetry, so this is very likely his way of showing that he intended to write 24 fugues altogether. See if you can hear each entrance of the fugue while you listen to Kimiko Ishizaka performing it. The 2nd prelude, in C-Minor, is a dramatic, almost mechanical creation where tempo and articulation are the principal interpretive tools available to the artist.

The piece has tempo indications from Bach, a rarity, in that bar 28 is marked presto , bar 34 adagio , and then allegro in bar You can also listen to the version of the Prelude No. The C-Minor Fugue, in three voices, is textbook material for learning what a fugue really is. DaveConservatoire uses a live performance by Kimiko Ishizaka from to exemplify various fugal constructions in this video:.

You can hear the later, studio recording of the same piece in this video. It is interesting to hear how Kimiko's interpretation of the piece evolved from to , over the course of constant study and multiple performances. This fugue's theme features the interval of the 6th very prominently, which is strongly linked to the overall feeling of exuberance and joy that the music expresses. The three fugue subjects are introduced from top to bottom and they never overlap no stretto. No other techniques, such as augmentation, diminution, or inversion are applied to the fugue theme.

One of the striking structural characteristics of the piece is the extended episode - music based on fragments of the theme, used in imitation, usually for modulation - between bars 29 and One of the key features of this episode is the imitative exchange of three note fragments between voices with running 16th notes in the third voice. The haunting five-voice fugue in B-flat minor has several characteristics which are notable. First, it is one of the rare fugues with five voices there are two in Book 1 of the Well-Tempered Clavier, and none in Book 2. Second, the theme features a dramatic and expressive leap of a minor 9th the big jump upwards between the 2nd and 3rd notes.

This is the only fugue theme to have such a dramatic leap. And finally, at the climactic moment of the piece, it features a mind-blowing hyperstretto. Stretto is the overlapping of the theme voices. Bach takes it to the extreme by overlapping all five voices, offset by only one note! See the diagram for an illustration. Skip to main content. The Prelude in C Major the first piece This one is a beloved favorite. The Eb Minor Prelude This piece will teach you the meaning of sound colours on the piano. Bach's son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach himself published a rather vague tuning method which was close to but still not equal temperament: Since there have been many other proposals and many performances of the work in different and unequal tunings, some derived from historical sources, some by modern authors.

Whatever their provenances, these schemes all promote the existence of subtly different musical characters in different keys, due to the sizes of their intervals. However, they disagree as to which key receives which character:. More recently there has been a series of proposals of temperaments derived from the handwritten pattern of loops on Bach's title page. These loops though truncated by a later clipping of the page can be seen at the top of the title page image at the beginning of the article.

Nevertheless, some musicologists say it is insufficiently proven that Bach's looped drawing signifies anything reliable about a tuning method. Bach may have tuned differently per occasion, or per composition, throughout his career. Each Prelude is followed by a Fugue in the same key. In each book the first Prelude and Fugue is in C major , followed by a Prelude and Fugue in its parallel minor key C minor. Then all keys, each major key followed by its parallel minor key, are followed through, each time moving up a half tone: The first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier was composed in the early s, with Bach's autograph dated Apart from the early versions of several preludes included in W.

Zum Nutzen und Gebrauch der Lehrbegierigen Musicalischen Jugend, als auch derer in diesem studio schon habil seyenden besonderem Zeitvertreib auffgesetzet und verfertiget von Johann Sebastian Bach. The well-tempered Clavier, or Preludes and Fugues through all the tones and semitones, both as regards the tertiam majorem or Ut Re Mi [i. For the profit and use of the studious musical young, and also for the special diversion of those who are already skilful in this study, composed and made by Johann Sebastian Bach, for the time being Capellmeister and Director of the Chamber-music of the Prince of Anhalt-Cothen.

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In the year The two major primary sources for this collection of Preludes and Fugues are the "London Original" LO manuscript, dated between and , with scribes including Bach, his wife Anna Magdalena and his oldest son Wilhelm Friedeman, which is the basis for Version A of WTC II , [29] and for Version B, that is the version published by the 19th-century Bach-Gesellschaft , a copy primarily written by Johann Christoph Altnickol Bach's son-in-law , with some corrections by Bach, and later also by Altnickol and others.

Prelude as a theme with variations. Fugue in three voices. Musically, the structural regularities of the Well-Tempered Clavier encompass an extraordinarily wide range of styles, more so than most pieces in the literature. The preludes are also notable for their odd or irregular numbers of measures, in terms of both the phrases and the total number of measures in a given prelude. Each fugue is marked with the number of voices, from two to five.

Most are three- and four-voiced fugues, and there are only two five-voiced fugues BWV and , and one two-voiced fugue BWV The fugues employ a full range of contrapuntal devices fugal exposition, thematic inversion, stretto , etc. Several attempts have been made to analyse the motivic connections between each prelude and fugue, [31] — most notably Wilhelm Werker [32] and Johann Nepomuk David [33] The most direct motivic reference appears in the B major set from Book 1, in which the fugue subject uses the first four notes of the prelude, in the same metric position but at half speed.

Both books of the Well-Tempered Clavier were widely circulated in manuscript, but printed copies were not made until , by three publishers almost simultaneously in Bonn, Leipzig and Zurich. But, with the maturing of the Classical style in the s, the Well-Tempered Clavier began to influence the course of musical history, with Haydn and Mozart studying the work closely.

Mozart transcribed some of the fugues of the Well-Tempered Clavier for string ensemble: Bach's example inspired numerous composers of the 19th century, for instance in Chopin started composing his 24 Preludes, Op. In the 20th century Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his 24 Preludes and Fugues , an even closer reference to Bach's model. The best-known piece from either book is the first prelude of Book I. Anna Magdalena Bach copied a short version of this prelude in her Notebook No. Helmut Walcha , better known as an organist, recorded both books between and on a harpsichord.

Anthony Newman has recorded it three times — twice on harpsichord and once on piano. As of , over recordings have been documented, [51] including the above keyboard instruments as well as transcriptions for ensembles and also synthesizers. Harpsichord performances of various parts of Book I by Martha Goldstein are in the public domain.

In March , the pianist Kimiko Douglass-Ishizaka released a new and complete recording of Book 1 into the public domain. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Played by Raymond Smullyan. Prelude and Fugue E major.

Played by Randolph Hokanson. Prelude and Fugue B minor. Prelude in B minor.

Books I and II, complete". The Definitive Guide to Classical Music. Seven Generations of Creative Genius , pp. Oxford University Press, Thematisches Verzeichnis der musikalischen Werke. Labyrinthus musicus, Calculus musicus, facsimile of the manuscripts. Diapason Press, Utrecht, Scarecrow Press, Lanham, Md.