Description
The gigue that closes Partita No. 1. Most of Bach's gigues are written fugally; this one is the exception, and it is the most celebrated virtuoso finale among the six partitas. Its writing — hands crossing one another while hammering out broken thirds — has a look and a sound unlike anything else in the keyboard repertoire.
In B-flat major, the hands are placed as though fighting over the same register, one striking across the other. The figure itself is no more than a repeated broken chord, but the crossing makes two arms sound like a single continuous line.
An advanced movement whose difficulty lies in the arms rather than the fingers. Keep the wrist at a constant height through each crossing and move from the elbow to clear a path. Until the hand positions are learned well enough to look away from the keys, raising the tempo will not steady it — and stiffening up from fear of wrong notes costs the movement the lightness that is its whole point.
Suite-form works from the Baroque era; Bach's Partitas, a sequence of varied dances, are ranked among the greatest keyboard works.
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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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