Prelude and Fugue in D major BWV 850 (The Well-Tempered Clavier, Part I)

Prelude played by Kimiko Douglass-Ishizaka

Fugue played by Kimiko Douglass-Ishizaka

Prelude and Fugue in D major , BWV 850, form a pair of works in Part 1 of the Well-Tempered Clavier , a collection of preludes and fugues for keyboard instruments by Johann Sebastian Bach .

Sheet music is temporarily disabled.

Prelude

The largest part of the prelude consists of a dancing bass part, interrupted by eighth pauses, with a sixteenth-note figure in the upper part. After an organ point on dominant A in bars 27-29, which is taken up again in bar 32, the last three bars are set in the stylus phantasticus , which allows a free choice of tempo. Whether only the first chord is to be arpeggiated in bar 34 or all chords up to the final bar 35 is left to the respective interpretation.

A similar musical texture with a dancing bass and a sixteenth note movement in the upper part can be found in the Etude Op. 10, No. 2 in A minor by Frédéric Chopin .

Gap

The fugue theme and with it the beginning of the piece surprises with a fanfare-like figure that runs through almost the whole piece. Philipp Spitta speaks of a combination of sudden flare-ups and pathetic grandeur .

An entirely different surprise is the lack of any contrapuntal subtleties. One searches in vain for a regularly performed counter-subject , and therefore a formal musical analysis is unnecessary . What is striking, however, is a motif made up of four sixteenth notes, which appears for the first time at the end of the third bar and which is processed into homophonic interludes in the further course (bars 9 and 17) . The specified four-part voice is hardly consistently maintained. It is heard mainly in the homophonic conclusion (bars 25-27), which, together with the dotted rhythms, is reminiscent of a Concerto grosso by Georg Friedrich Handel .

literature

• Peter Benary: JS Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier: Text - Analysis - Playback . MN 718, H. & B. Schneider, Aarau 2005.
• Alfred Dürr : Johann Sebastian Bach - The Well-Tempered Clavier . 4th edition. Bärenreiter Introduction to Works, 2012, ISBN 978-3-7618-1229-7 .
• Cecil Gray: The Forty-eight Preludes and Fugues of JS Bach.  - Internet Archive . Oxford University Press, London / New York / Toronto 1938.

Web links

• The Well-Tempered Clavier I, Johann Sebastian Bach : Sheet Music and Audio Files in the International Music Score Library Project
• Hermann Keller : BWV 850. (PDF)
• BWV 850. (Flash) David Korevaar

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Peter Benary: JS Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier: Text - Analysis - Playback . MN 718, H. & B. Schneider, Aarau 2005, p. 28
2. ^ Philipp Spitta: Johann Sebastian Bach . Volume 1. Breitkopf & Härtel, Leipzig 1873.
3. ↑ Peter Benary: JS Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier: Text - Analysis - Playback . MN 718, H. & B. Schneider, Aarau 2005, p. 29