Description
This is the closing movement of French Suite No. 6 in E major, BWV 817. A Baroque suite customarily ends with a gigue, and No. 6 rounds off its sequence of dances, begun with the Allemande, with this quick one. Suite No. 6 has eight movements, and this is also the last movement of the six French Suites as a whole.
It is in E major and 6/8. The gigue is a fast dance in compound time, its beat divided into three for a bouncing flow. Here the subject appears in one hand and the other imitates it, in contrapuntal writing. It is in binary form, each half repeated; the range runs from C#2 to B5, and with 664 notes in about 81 seconds it is one of the busiest movements in the suite.
It sits at the upper end of intermediate, and because both hands move constantly as equals, the independence of the left hand is the main challenge. Feeling 6/8 as two large beats per bar keeps the quick notes from driving you. Use the hand colours to see which hand has the subject, and slow the playback speed to follow the left hand alone by ear; the imitation between the hands will start to come through.
Six keyboard suites by Bach that elegantly incorporate Baroque dance forms.
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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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