Description
The opening movement of Partita No. 5 in G major. Bach gave each of the six partitas a differently titled prelude, and No. 5 opens with a Praeambulum, a word meaning a preface. All six were published together in 1731 as Part I of the Clavier-Übung.
In G major and 3/4, rapid scales and broken-chord passages run without a break, alternating with struck chords to make a bright, energetic start. With 1,407 notes in 144 seconds, about ten per second, it is one of the densest movements in the suite. Its range runs from G1 to D6, and the lowest note cannot be played on a 61-key keyboard.
Rated advanced. The tasks are evenness in the fast passages and joining figures that pass from one hand to the other without a seam. The hand colours show where the hands take over from each other, and practising a passage isolated with the A-B loop at a reduced playback speed makes those changes visible. Whether the downbeats stay steady as the tempo rises is a good measure of how far the movement has come. With such long runs of figuration, it helps to combine practising section by section with playing it straight through.
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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