Description
The Sarabande is the fourth movement of Partita No. 5 in G major. It follows the Allemande and Corrente and comes before the Tempo di Minuetta and Passepied, slowing the pace among faster movements. The sarabande is a slow triple-time dance and one of the central movements of a Bach suite.
In G major and 3/4, the melody unfolds slowly with ornaments, within the sarabande's characteristic metre, which tends to put weight on the second beat. At 502 notes in 127 seconds, it is far less dense than the Praeambulum or the Gigue of the same suite. Its range runs from A1 to C6, and the lowest note lies below the left end of a 61-key keyboard, though an octave shift fits it on one.
Rated advanced. There are not many notes, but at a slow tempo the melodic line must not break, and it has to stay balanced against the accompanying voices. Lower the playback speed to hear the harmony change, and repeat a single phrase with the A-B loop to check that the ornaments do not disturb the flow of the beat. The hand colours make the division between melody and accompaniment easy to see.
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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