Prelude and Fugue in E minor BWV 855 (The Well-Tempered Clavier, Part I)

Prelude played by Kimiko Douglass-Ishizaka

Fugue played by Kimiko Douglass-Ishizaka

Prelude and Fugue in E minor , BWV 855, form a pair of works in the 1st part of the Well-Tempered Clavier , a collection of preludes and fugues for keyboard instruments by Johann Sebastian Bach .

Prelude

An early version in the piano booklet for Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (BWV 855a) contains only 23 bars. It essentially consists of the bass line, with chords in the right hand added on the first and third beats. The later version for the Well-Tempered Clavier represents a noticeable leap in quality: Bach first adds an elegant melody in the upper part to the bass line mentioned . Furthermore, the cadence in bar 23 no longer leads to the tonic , but to the subdominant in A minor. This is followed by a Presto section in virtuoso sixteenth bars, so that the piece now comprises 41 bars. The priority that Bach - if not in principle, at least very often - gives linear melody over observing vertical dissonances is shown in the penultimate bar with four successive dissonances.

Gap

This is the only two-part fugue - not only in the Well-Tempered Clavier, but also in Bach's oeuvre, if one disregards a not reliably authenticated Fughetta in C minor (BWV 961). With her sixteenth runs she continues the prelude immediately and surpasses it with her aggressive tone.

Perhaps to compensate for the two voices, the theme itself is latently two-part, with a chromatically downward “lower part”. It modulates in the dominant B minor, ends with a sixth jump at the beginning of bar 3 and real answers , whereupon the comes ends in bar 5 in the double dominant F sharp major.

The 42-bar fugue is divided into two equally long parts of 19 bars, each of which is concluded by unison or unison . As in the prelude, the first part ends in the subdominant A minor. In the second part, the upper and lower parts are exchanged compared to the first . The second part is followed by a four-bar coda with a hint of narrowing . The two final bars dispense with contrapuntal part leading. An amazingly short, arpeggiated E major chord ends the piece, as it were in the air.

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 855. (PDF)
• BWV 855. (Flash) Philip Goeth

Individual evidence

1. ^ Alfred Dürr: Johann Sebastian Bach - The Well-Tempered Clavier . Bärenreiter, 2000, p. 152.
2. ↑ Peter Benary: JS Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier: Text - Analysis - Playback . MN 718, H. & B. Schneider, Aarau 2005. p. 43
3. ↑ Hermann Keller: The Well-Tempered Clavier, p. 74  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF)