Description
A melodic line woven into an unbroken flow of quick notes gives this C minor Allemande its shadowed, introspective tone. It is the first dance of Partita No. 2, BWV 826, entering after the dramatic Sinfonia. Bach's six partitas came out one at a time from 1726, No. 2 in 1727, and were gathered in 1731 as Part I of the Clavier-Übung.
The allemande is a dance of moderate pace, customarily the first dance of a suite. This one is in binary form, each half repeated; the range runs from A1 to C6, with 846 notes in about 99 seconds.
It is an advanced piece whose central challenge is bringing out the outline of the melody from a dense flow of notes. Played at an even level throughout it turns flat, so you need to shape it around harmonic changes and phrase peaks. Slow the playback speed to hear the movement of the harmony, follow the voices in the score view, and isolate the intricate passages with the A-B loop.
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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