Description
Bach told the quick, light Italian type of this dance apart from the French courante by giving it the Italian name corrente, and that is the type chosen for the third movement of Partita No. 1. For all that both are in triple meter, its character is nothing like the stately dotted French courante.
Still in B-flat major, fine notes run on without a break, shaking off the heavy tread of the preceding allemande at a stroke. The left hand moves as much as the right, and the gap between the two hands' note counts is the narrowest in the suite. Over eight hundred notes are packed into barely a hundred seconds — the densest movement here.
Its advanced difficulty is less the speed than getting through without losing the frame of the triple meter. Notes laid out at even intervals leave the listener unable to hear where each bar begins. Establish the downbeat of every bar at a slow tempo first, then build the speed on that footing.
Suite-form works from the Baroque era; Bach's Partitas, a sequence of varied dances, are ranked among the greatest keyboard works.
Browse all songs in Partitas →Sheet Music
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.
View all works by Bach →