Prelude and Fugue in F minor BWV 857 (The Well-Tempered Clavier, Part I)

Prelude played by Kimiko Douglass-Ishizaka

Fugue played by Kimiko Douglass-Ishizaka

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Prelude and Fugue in F minor , BWV 857, 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 .

Prelude

This is a bound organ style piece of serious character. The motif with the ascending broken chord is recorded in the second half of bar 2 in the bass and then repeated several times. Despite the four-part notation, there is a three-part sound in many places. A shorter original form is known from a copy by Johann Nikolaus Forkel , in which bar 15 ended in two bars. In this version, the half-close to A flat major in bar 9 was exactly in the middle. The current version, already handed down in the piano book for Wilhelm Friedemann Bach , extends the musical event with a five-bar organ point on the dominant from bar 17, in preparation for the end. The piece now contains 22 bars, with the middle in bar 11 marked with the double c ³ as the climax - an indication of how much Bach is always concerned with architectural design.

Gap

The theme contains numerous semitones, in this respect it is only surpassed by the last fugue of the first volume. The comes with the minor third occurs only once in measure 4, all subsequent eight thematic entries are again in their original form. The four-part fugue contains two or three obbligato counterpoints, depending on the point of view, which create a contrast to the measured quarter rhythm of the theme with various sixteenth-note movements. Seen harmoniously , the theme and the counter-subjects result in a sentence of unusual harshness and dissonance. On the other hand, there are soothing, purely diatonic interludes that consciously contrast the chromatic theme - the fourth theme entry in the soprano only takes place after a three-bar interlude. The peculiar shape of this joint is best captured when the concept of closed implementation dispensed with entirely and is limited to the change of the chromatic theme and the diatonic interludes. The sixteenth-note compression from bar 53 serves the final design, which also includes the sigh motif in alto, which is heard here for the first time .

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 857. (PDF)
• BWV 857. (Flash) Philip Goeth

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hermann Keller
2. ↑ Cecil Gray: The forty-eight Preludes and Fugues of JS Bach . Oxford University Press, 1938
3. ↑ Hermann Keller: The Well-Tempered Clavier I and II . Cotta, Stuttgart 1948, p. 81.
4. ↑ Peter Benary: JS Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier: Text - Analysis - Playback . MN 718, H. & B. Schneider AG. Aarau, 2005. p. 49.