Description
A D minor aria that began as a song, "So oft ich meine Tabakspfeife", drawing a lesson about the shortness of life from the smoke of a pipe, a commonplace conceit of the time. It was written into the Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach, and a vocal piece played as a keyboard miniature is entirely in the spirit of that book.
In D minor and triple time, the vocal line sits in the right hand while the left simply supports it with chords. It runs about half a minute, but the settled shade of the minor and the small breath at the end of each phrase leave no doubt that this was once sung.
With under a hundred notes across three octaves, the challenge for a beginner is interpretive rather than technical. Treating the line as a text to be sung — deciding where to breathe and which notes to hold a little longer before playing a note — makes an audible difference, and the shorter the piece, the plainer that difference is.
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Sheet music provided by Mutopia Project
About the Composer
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Johann Sebastian Bach was the towering figure of German Baroque music, serving for decades as Cantor of St. Thomas Church in Leipzig. Renowned for his mastery of counterpoint, he laid the foundations of keyboard music with works such as The Well-Tempered Clavier and the Inventions. This site includes minuets and polonaises from the Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach, the Inventions and Sinfonias, and fugues from The Well-Tempered Clavier. The Notebook pieces are catalogued with BWV Anh. (appendix) numbers, but many are by other composers - Petzold's minuets among them - or by no one known, and most of their song pages give the current view of who wrote them.
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