In case you didn’t know (and I certainly didn’t) batophobia is fear of sky-scrapers. If you suffer from that particular perfectly sensible irrational terror, don’t ever, ever, ever come to Kuala Lumpur – the place is chock-a-block with the bloody things! There are a few architectural remnants of the old colonial days: the British […]
Tag Archives: Well-tempered Klavier
Having started our course with the first Prelude & Fugue in Book I, it seems only right to finish with last in Book II. You can listen to the b Fugue by clicking on the audio link below; and the score – split into its three separate voices – is available under ‘Course materials’ just beneath it. In […]
In the header image of this blog (‘signed’ portraits of Bach and Wagner) you can see that the older composer is holding a piece of paper, unsurprisingly this turns out to be manuscript paper; even closer inspection (see below) reveals that it contains the music of the six part triple canon BWV1076. The middle voice (circled […]
‘When Bach writes of sorrow, it never crushes us. Perhaps because there is no trace of bitterness. ’ Wanda Landowska ‘Contemplative’, ‘remotely beautiful’, ‘a calm and floating unearthliness’ – descriptions of the f# Prelude from Book 2 vie with one another in a futile attempt to capture an emotional world that exists in music, and only in music. And […]
This week it’s the turn of the brilliant G Prelude and Fugue from Book II. Here’s the exposition of the fugue: The articulations (staccatos, mezzo-staccatos, slurs, tenutos, etc.) are, of course, mine and serve to illustrate some of the sort of decisions (other than tempo) that interpreters have to make when approaching these pieces. The […]
Here’s the beginning of Book II of the Well-Tempered Clavier (the second Prelude in C) and below it you can listen to a performance of these three bars (or thereabouts) by seven of the most famous Bach interpreters: Here’s Bach for every taste from high romance to strict puritanism. Which do you prefer? Come along on […]
We are, I hope, by now getting familiar with fugue-speak – ‘statements’, ‘answers’ (real or tonal), ‘episodes’, ‘inversions’, ‘strettos’ (or ‘i’ if you prefer) and so on, are all grist to our mill. So the time has come, I reckon, to examine that most recondite of fugues in that most recondite of keys, No. 8 in d-sharp. It’s […]
The Well Tempered Clavier, or preludes and fugues in all tones and semitones, in the major as well as the minor modes, for the benefit and use of musical youth desirous of knowledge as well as those who are already advanced in this study. For their especial diversion, composed and prepared by Johann Sebastian Bach, […]
This Prelude and Fugue has, as you can see, a considerable number of sharps; in fact it has seven, moving every note of the scale up a semitone. In ‘just’ tuning the results of performing in such an exotic key (or, even worse, F#!) would have been, to say the least, rather unpleasant. But for Bach […]
Tuning can be a source of some curmudgeonliness on the part of both players and listeners (‘he always plays sharp!’ …‘Who’s got the third? Hmmm – it could be a bit brighter, couldn’t it?’ …‘the intonation in that Allegro was distinctly iffy’, etc.) So, how does tuning work? Is it fixed for every note? What does Bach mean […]
