Description
I thank you, dear Lord is the meaning of this hymn's opening line, and Bach's A major setting in 4/4 packs 225 notes into 46 seconds, giving its inner voices more movement than the chorale BWV 259. Known as BWV 347, it belongs to Bach's four-part chorales: settings of hymns, largely drawn from his cantatas and other works, that were collected and printed after his death and long studied as models of harmony.
The hymn tune lies in the soprano, supported by alto, tenor and bass, with a cadence at the end of each phrase, at about five notes per second. Its range, E2 to E5, fits on a 61-key keyboard.
Rated intermediate. A major uses three black keys, and with four voices shared between two hands, the task is finding fingerings that hold the inner voices while the melody comes forward. Lower the playback speed to hear each voice separately, and repeat one phrase with the A-B loop. Checking with the hand colours which hand the tenor is given to makes the fingering easier to decide.
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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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