ExclusiveBach: The Well Tempered Clavier, Book I, Prelude and Fugue No. 13 in F # Major, BWV 858

【Classical music and nature 古典音樂小站】Johann Sebastian Bach: The Well Tempered Clavier, Book I, Prelude and Fugue No. 13 in F-sharp major, BWV 858. This beautiful piece was played by Raymond Smullyan. It has Creative Commons license (CC BY 3.0 DEED Attribution 3.0 Unported) and is provided through www.musopen.org.

An integral Wohltemperirte Clavier, such as sometimes undertaken by many a brave musician, would probably not have happened in Bach’s day. It was not concert music, let alone a concert cycle. Or was it? Because why else would Bach create such clear dramatic curves, with the Fugue in F minor BWV 881 - key 12 of 24 - as the definite ending of a chapter, full stop, hard return?

Whatever the case, Prelude 13 feels like a new beginning within the Wohltemperirte Clavier. The piece invites you to catch your breath for a moment. It is mild, dancy and maybe unusually ‘ordinary’ for its key, as F-sharp major is known as one of the more exotic keys. A punctuated rhythm forms the motor underneath runs that whirl endlessly and without interruption. The notation is reminiscent of the style of a French overture (see, for example, the elegant sixteenth Goldberg Variation, which incidentally is also a ‘new start’ piece), but Bach leaves no room whatsoever for Gallic flair. With great precision, he places the short notes on top of one another, so that the player can never escape the rhythmic clockwork. He also wrote out the ornaments himself.

The fugue is in the form of a gavotte; a rather heavy dance that opens halfway through the bar. This is unusual for a fugue, but Bach makes it even more confusing by beginning with a trill on the 7th tone of the scale - the leading tone - which wants to resolve into the root of F-sharp, at all costs. But Bach provides no resolution and does not yet complete the complex harmonic puzzle. He embarks on a passage of endless motion, in which the parts only calm down right at the very end. Anyone who also manages to interweave it with galant, sighing thirds and sixths, in very modern fashion, must come from good stock - Bach stock, beyond a doubt." (Source: bachvereniging.nl)

The video was captured by Simone Schlegel in Switzerland and edited by Wenjing Ma.




#classicalmusic, #Music, #古典音樂, #klassischemusik, #GJWexclusive, #Switzerland, #Schweiz, #Natur, #Nature, #KlassischeMusikundNatur, #ClassicalMusicAndNature, #古典音樂小站,