Das Wohltemperierte Clavier II, Fuga II
Description
From a short, taut subject this C minor fugue draws a surprising number of combinations, packing contrapuntal technique into a small frame. It belongs to the second prelude-and-fugue pair of Book II of The Well-Tempered Clavier, which was compiled around the early 1740s.
It is a four-voice fugue in C minor and 4/4. The short, taut subject appears in turn in each voice, and tension builds through passages where entries crowd in on one another and overlap. It spans C2 to C6, so 61 keys are enough.
Rated intermediate, it lasts about 1 minute 59 seconds with 649 notes in this data. The note count is modest, but with four voices shared between two hands, the task is to bring out the subject even when it lies in an inner voice; where one hand holds two voices, finger substitution is needed as well. Slow the playback to check each entry of the subject one at a time, and sort out which hand plays which voice with the hand colours, and the reading goes much more smoothly.
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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