Description
Small triple units tick by quickly in this bright, bouncing D major piece, the first in the Inventions to be in a triple metre. It follows C major and C minor as the third of the set. Bach made the fair copy of the collection in 1723, having earlier entered first versions in the keyboard notebook for his eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann. Teaching material for a son at home became a collection studied widely ever since.
The subject appears in one hand and is then taken up by the other, so the hands toss the same figure back and forth as the piece moves on. Its 495 notes fit into about 67 seconds and reach from D2 to B5.
Feeling each bar of 3/8 as a single beat gives the music flow; counting every eighth note tends to make it heavy. At a lively tempo the exchanges between the hands come quickly, and the left hand's figures need the same clarity as the right's. Slow the playback speed to follow the figures as they pass between the hand colours, and repeat the hand-overs with the A-B loop so the flow holds as the tempo comes up.
A set of 15 two-part counterpoint studies (BWV 772-786) that Bach composed for his son's musical education.
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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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