Prelude and Fugue in D minor BWV 851 (The Well-Tempered Clavier, Part I)

Prelude played by Kimiko Douglass-Ishizaka

Fugue played by Kimiko Douglass-Ishizaka

Prelude and Fugue in D minor , BWV 851, form a pair of works in the first part of the Well-Tempered Clavier , a collection of preludes and fugues for keyboard instruments by Johann Sebastian Bach .

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Prelude

In this prelude, with an improvisational, toccata- like character, the movement of the bass voice and, at the end of the piece, a few bold harmonic progressions stand out.

The similarity of the preludes in C major and C minor corresponds to that of the preludes in D major and D minor. In the first 14 bars of the D minor prelude, a pawn is repeatedly transformed into new variations. This figure can be understood as a chord progression or as a two-part movement, but at the same time also as a motif that appears in a group of three of sixteenth notes. From bar 15 the playing figure is given up and replaced by a reinforced chord set with an organ point on D.

In bars 24 and 25, diminished triads follow one another in the solo upper part, with an enharmonic mix-up between D-flat and E-flat, before the work dissolves in the final bar 26 with a chord sequence in D major. A similar enharmonic mix-up can be found in Homage to Johann Sebastian Bach , No. 79 of Béla Bartók's Mikrokosmos .

Gap

The fugue theme is processed in a complex way in the course of the three-part piece. The theme appears 18 times in its original form and six times as an inversion , with inverted intervals. The theme entry in bar 8 on the second level contains a melodic distortion: the ambitus of a diminished seventh becomes that of a diminished octave .

As another contrapuntal masterpieces can be found here numerous strettos and sham inserts, which are restricted to the subjects head. In bars 27-29 the theme is combined with its own inversion, and even narrowed. The fugue contains 44 bars, the middle of the fugue in bar 21 being clearly marked as a cadenza after A minor. The two final bars surprise with a sudden, homophonic six-part voice - a unique piece in a three-part fugue.

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 851. (PDF)
• BWV 851. (Flash) David Korevaar

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Cecil Gray: The forty-eight Preludes and Fugues of JS Bach . Oxford University Press, 1938, p. 30
2. ↑ Peter Benary: JS Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier: Text - Analysis - Playback . MN 718, H. & B. Schneider, Aarau 2005, p. 30
3. ↑ Cecil Gray: The forty-eight Preludes and Fugues of JS Bach. Oxford University Press, 1938. p. 32
4. ↑ Peter Benary: JS Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier: Text - Analysis - Playback . MN 718, H. & B. Schneider, Aarau 2005, p. 31