Description
The Art of Fugue is a late collection in which Bach derived a series of fugues and canons from a single subject; it was published in 1751, after his death. Contrapunctus I is the first piece, presenting in its original form the subject that the later pieces transform. No instrument is specified, and it is often played on the keyboard.
In D minor and 2/2, it is a four-voice fugue in which the subject appears in each voice in turn, without yet using inversion or changes of speed. It has 898 notes in 158 seconds, and its range, D2 to B-flat 5, fits on a 61-key keyboard.
Rated advanced. There are few fast passages, but four voices have to be shared between two hands and the subject must be audible in whichever voice carries it. Isolate the entries with the A-B loop and check each line at a reduced playback speed. Following the voices in the score view, and seeing with the hand colours which hand takes the inner voices, makes clear the subject from which the whole collection grows.
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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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