Prelude and Fugue in F major BWV 856 (The Well-Tempered Clavier, Part I)

Prelude played by Kimiko Douglass-Ishizaka

Fugue played by Kimiko Douglass-Ishizaka

Prelude and Fugue in F major , BWV 856, 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

This prelude is a two-part, in the character of a gigue related Invention . It was taken over without change from the piano book for Wilhelm Friedemann Bach , only the trills on the long held notes were given a double beat. The motivic descent from bar 15 from the highest to the lowest register ends in a briefly broken end. This high-spirited setting is particularly found in Bach's youthful works, for example in the fugue to the organ toccata in C major BWV 564, which Bach composed in 1708 as a 23-year-old during his Weimar period.

Gap

The three-part fugue has the rhythm and graceful character of a passepied . It resembles the last fugue ( B minor ) from the second part, but is worked through more strictly than that. As with the fugue themes in C major and E major , the theme transitions imperceptibly into counterpoint . The 72 ³ ⁄ ₈ bars are divided into two equally long parts of 36 bars and have exactly the same length as the 18 ¹² ⁄ ₈ bars of the prelude. The second part of the fugue begins with an organ point on A and, in bars 36–40 and 46–48 , brings about narrow passages that one looks for in vain in the B minor fugue of the second part. The final increase can be heard from measure 56, with ascending eighth-note scales in the bass and in the two upper voices as well as a closing hemiole .

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 856. (PDF)
• BWV 856. (Flash) Philip Goeth

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hermann Keller : The Well-Tempered Clavier I and II . Cotta, Stuttgart 1948, p. 75.
2. ↑ Hermann Keller: The Well-Tempered Clavier I and II . Cotta, Stuttgart 1948, p. 77.