Description
The sarabande of Partita No. 1. As the slow movement at the heart of the suite, it descends from a Spanish triple-meter dance, but by Bach's day the slow style weighted on the second beat had long since settled in, and the form was treated less as a dance than as a space for instrumental meditation.
In B-flat major and triple meter, it is the shortest movement in the suite, yet the right hand plays nearly three times as many notes as the left. The melody is ornamented without restraint, layering fine figures on top of one another within the span of a single note, while the left hand supplies little more than the pillars of the harmony — a contrast that sharpens the delicacy of the decoration.
An advanced movement. It lasts under a minute, and how the ornaments are handled changes everything about it. Smoothing the written small notes mechanically buries the melodic frame under the decoration. It helps to play the line once with the ornaments stripped away, and only then decide how that song should be dressed.
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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