Description
A minuet in F major, BWV Anh. 113, written down right beside the far more famous G major minuet, BWV Anh. 114. Both belong to the Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach, the household album begun in 1725. The book gathers the music actually played at home, mixing Bach's own pieces with popular keyboard miniatures by other composers without distinguishing between them, and gives a clear picture of domestic music-making in the Bach household.
The writing is in two voices throughout: the right hand sings over a left hand that quietly outlines the harmony in triple time. Almost no ornaments are notated, which leaves the harmonic motion itself to carry the expression. It falls into the standard binary form of the dance, each half repeated, with the second half moving to the dominant before finding its way home.
The piece stays within about four octaves and asks for few leaps, making it a practical first step into Baroque two-voice playing. Its difficulty lies in the pulse rather than the fingers: keeping the weight on the first beat of each bar, carrying a phrase across the barline, and holding the left hand a level below the melody are what turn the notes into music.
The minuet, an elegant triple-time dance popular in the Baroque era, evoking the refined atmosphere of a courtly ball.
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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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