Description
Moving at a settled pace, this F minor prelude stands before a fugue known for its chromatic subject. It is the twelfth piece of Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier, where the first half of the book comes to a close.
Written in 4/4, it keeps a steady figure while moving through the harmony: the bass lays a firm foundation and the upper voice traces a line shaded by the minor mode. There are no sudden changes; within the same motion, the colour of the harmony keeps shifting. It never leaves the C2-C6 span, so a 61-key keyboard will do.
Rated intermediate, it lasts about 1 minute 16 seconds with 527 notes in this data. The task is to hear the changes of harmony within the repeating pattern and convey them as changes of colour, finding a balance in which the bass is not too heavy and the upper line rises naturally. Slow the playback and follow the bass and upper voice in their hand colours, and use an A-B loop on places where the harmony moves most, and the flow of the piece takes on depth. The four-voice fugue that follows is long and weighty, so the pair holds together best when this prelude is played as a calm introduction to it.
Bach's collection of preludes and fugues for keyboard, covering all 24 keys and regarded as the summit of contrapuntal writing.
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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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