Description
The right hand states a 12/8 subject alone before the left joins with the same subject in this fugal gigue, and the second half opens with the left hand playing that subject upside down. It closes Partita No. 3. The gigue was the lively dance that customarily ended a Baroque suite, and Bach often brought fugal writing into that final place.
In A minor, the subject is a figure of quavers climbing through the A minor chord, and even quavers, not dotted ones, run on unbroken to the end. The subject appears in each of three voices in turn; while one hand has it, the other supports it with held notes or a countermelody. In the second half the descending inverted form is passed between the voices in the same way, and at about five minutes it is the longest of this suite's movements on the site.
An advanced movement asking for stamina to match its length and for an ear that can tell which voice the subject has entered. Find the entries in the score view, and use the hand colours to check which hand is carrying the subject at each point. Feeling the 12/8 as four large dotted-crotchet beats steadies the flow. Lower the playback speed, repeat the handovers with the A-B loop, and raise the tempo only once the voices sit together.
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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