Well-Tempered Summer

With only teaching one class during the Summer term, it made sense to find a project, so I brought home two scores–Beethoven’s string quartets, and book 1 of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier.  I barely cracked the Beethoven–that may be next summer’s project–but playing through Bach has been good for my limited piano chops and, as always, a glimpse at the mind of one of the greatest composers who has ever lived.

I bought my first copy of the Well-Tempered Clavier as an undergraduate, after discovering the recordings of Glenn Gould and the c-minor Prelude and Fugue in our music history anthology.  I played from it now and again, but couldn’t really make my fingers work from it; in orchestration class, I scored the D-major fugue as my final project.  Then, after graduation, my copy disappeared, probably mistakenly picked up by a young piano student (taking lessons from my roommate) on her way out the door.  May she get as much from it as I have.

I purchased another copy around 2000, but never did much with it until I took advanced 18th-century counterpoint from Jan Radzynski as a doctoral student.  The subject of the course was fugue, so we duly studied many of the expositions.  At my first college position, in Oklahoma, I taught Form and Analysis, so I conducted in-depth analyses of the pieces found in that course’s anthology, and worked up the F-major fugue to an acceptable level.  I’ve also done an analysis of the e-minor fugue for this blog.

This summer, though, I’ve kept my score for WTC I on the piano rack continuously, picking through the pieces as they caught my fancy and generally enjoying Bach’s mastery of the form.  Some notable observations:

The c-minor fugue was really the one that started my interest in this collection back in about 1995, and I don’t know if it’s anthologized so often because it’s near the front of the volume, or because it’s just about perfect.

The c#-major prelude caught my fingers this summer–I wish I had the skills to play it well or the time to learn it passably.

The two five-voice fugues–c# minor and bb minor–are sprawling examples of the ricercar, and stunning in their effectiveness.  The c#-minor double fugue is particularly amazing.

I hated the D-major fugue when it was assigned to me in orchestration class and I really listened to it for the first time, but I came to love it, and for all its strangeness, I still do.  A fugue as the first part of a French overture…

The d-minor prelude is the kind of moto perpetuo that attracts so many of us to Bach in the first place–wondrous arpeggios against a simple bass.

The d-minor fugue is everything the one in c minor is, but features the subject in inversion and a real answer.  Genius!

The irony of the E-flat major set is that the prelude takes much longer than the fugue to play…

The e-flat-minor fugue has it all–inversion, stretto, augmentation–in the ricercar manner.

The E-major prelude has a wonderful lyricism mixed with surprising chromatic movements as punctuation, and ends without a perfect authentic cadence.

The F-major set is bright and sparkling, with a stretto-obsessed canzona-type fugue.

My copious notes on the F#-major fugue date from from graduate school, and Dr. Radzynski chose wisely.

For such a key as G major, Bach chooses a fugue subject that allows a pianist to be brilliant in that comfortable key.

The g-minor pieces are wondrous, and a joy to play, as are those in A-flat major.

The g#-minor fugue is in a daunting key, but well worth the effort, as Bach makes very interesting use of countersubject technique.

The subject of the A-major fugue is daring–only the best pianist can make it work when it’s surrounded by other voices.

I discovered the a-minor prelude last winter, and wish I would have known it sooner.  A little masterpiece, and the same is true of the fugue.

The Bb-major prelude is the perfect antidote to the long the fugue which precedes it, with its stile brise approach.  The repetition in the subject of its own fugue is infectious!

The b-minor prelude was clearly meant to be a trio sonata movement.  I may have to set it for brass trio…

The book ends with a fugue in b-minor that is almost a summation of all that has come before.

I don’t need to recommend this work, of course, but I do so anyway.  It is critical for a composer to have analysis projects of this sort–they are composition lessons with our greatest predecessors, and none of those more deserves our attention than J.S. Bach.

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