Die Kunst der Fuge, Contrapunctus XIII - Canon alla Duodecima
Johann Sebastian Bach (1750)
Description
In this canon at the twelfth, in D minor and 2/2, the following voice copies the leading one a twelfth (an octave plus a fifth) away, and the pairing heard in the first half comes back in the second with the voices exchanged, upper for lower. The Art of Fugue, from which it comes, appeared in print in 1751 and works a single subject into a whole series of fugues and canons. It appears here as Contrapunctus XIII; standard editions number the canons apart from the fugues.
It is written in only two voices. Counterpoint at the twelfth is built to remain correct when turned upside down in this way. It has 1,897 notes in 233 seconds, and its range, C#2 to B-flat 5, fits on a 61-key keyboard.
Rated advanced. With two voices following the same melody a twelfth apart, each hand must play its own independent line clearly. Practise passages isolated with the A-B loop at a reduced playback speed, and identify the leading voice with the hand colours. In the score view, compare the second half, with its voices exchanged, against the first.
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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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