Description
Partita No. 1 contains two minuets of differing character, and both are played here in succession. Returning to the first after the second — the Menuet I–II–I pattern — was the standard shape of the day, and the ancestor of both later ternary form and the scherzo with trio. It sits between the weight of the sarabande and the rush of the gigue like a place to catch breath.
In B-flat major and triple meter, it uses fewer notes and a narrower range than the other movements. The first minuet is a plain two-voice texture, the second lighter and mixed with broken chords: same meter, same key, only the feel of the writing exchanged.
At intermediate level, this is the most approachable movement of the suite. With the technical load low, how the two minuets are distinguished becomes the quality of the performance. Keep the tempo and make the difference in character with colour and articulation alone. Rather than laying out three even beats, put the weight on the first, and the dance comes back.
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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