The Well-Tempered Clavier

I don't want it to sound like I know now, but I definitely feel that Bach is someone I am going to continue playing for the rest of my life now.

And I'm actually already planning the second book of the Well-Tempered Clavier for spring 28, also at Wigmore, but then in other places as well.

And I've recorded the first book and it will come out next

May,

And that was the biggest challenge for me.

And this is still what I'm, you know, I think this is my ongoing challenge every time I approach The Well-Tempered again.

the well-tempered clavier again um and the reason i went for the well-tempered clavier and not for any of the other many suites from vertitas variations or options that could have gone is just the sheer variety it's like a treasure trove um all the styles are there from dance movements to vocal like movements um chamber music, like a trio sonatas.

And every fugue and every prelude is utterly different.

I've planned a very special program tonight.

My first offering this evening is a familiar group of preludes and fugues called The Well-Tempered Clavier by Johann Sebastian Bach.

The Well-Tempered Clavier Thank you, thank you, thank you, gentlemen.

I hope you've enjoyed this evening's concert.

And now I shall be pleased to accept your donations.

So I just, you know, actually in one of the first...

Actually, no, the first arrangement I think I really did consciously was in undergrad, and I stole one of Bach's piano fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier, and I was like, I want to play this on the violin.

So I think I've had this thing of, well, my dad's a pianist, and I love the piano repertoire as much as I know of it, which is not a lot.

But I'm always like, oh, I want to play that on the violin.

telemann was offered the job and things progressed so far that the authorities debated whether the address welcoming him should be in latin or in german but telemann who already held a lucrative position in hamburg determined to find out which town would offer him the better inducement hamburg increased his already considerable stipend so in hamburg he remained graupner on the other hand would have come gladly but his darmstadt masters declined to release him before the final decision was made bach made it his business to be on hand at leipzig when it became clear to graupner that he was out of the running he heartily recommended the latter was requested in order to prove his fitness for the post he sought to conduct in the church of st thomas on good friday seventeen twenty three a work of his own composition appropriate to the day that work was the passion according to st john which though it may have been written hurriedly is a creation of such transcendent grandeur that only the later passion according to st matthew can be said to excel it in lyric splendor and sublimity as soon as graupner's decision was known bach asked prince leopold for his official leave the letter of dismissal was couched in most friendly and flattering terms at leipzig bach executed a document binding himself to discharge all the duties of the cantorship undertaking to teach a variety of subjects and even to give private lessons in singing without extra pay the only thing he balked at was taking charge of latin classes for this chore he agreed to provide a substitute at his own expense then he took leave of prince leopold with whom he remained on terms of the closest friendship till the prince's death five years later on may five seventeen twenty three he received from the burgomaster of leipzig the ceremonious notification of his unanimous appointment on may thirty he conducted at the church of st nicholas which he served alternately with the church of st thomas the cantata the hungry shall be fed Therewith he inaugurated his office.

bach settled in leipzig at the age of thirty-eight he remained there the rest of his life true he came and went and he made journeys of one sort or another but they were never far distant or protracted in leipzig he created his grandest his most colossal and also his profoundest and subtlest works his duties were incredibly numerous and often heartbreakingly heavy he was responsible it has been said to all and to none again and again he had the rector of the st thomas school the city council the church consistory and yet others about his ears he had to look after the musical services in four churches two of them the most important in the town under exasperating conditions he had to teach turbulent and ruffianly pupils he had to combat official ill-will and intrigue for the performances he was obliged to conduct he had vocal and instrumental forces that strike us as laughably inadequate and were in numberless cases grossly unskilled the demands on his physical and spiritual strength must have been appalling yet bach appears to have had the resources and the resistance of a giant we know that over and over again his temper his obstinate nature and inborn pugnacity were tried to the uttermost but in the face of all irritations he was earning enough his home life was comfortable he met and entertained artists he had the satisfaction of knowing that his sons could enjoy the educational advantages of leipzig and he gradually gathered about him a company of greatly gifted young students and devoted disciples in the course of years he shifted some of his most unsympathetic duties to other shoulders how he could otherwise have written the gigantic amount of music he did is an unanswerable question for consider he came to leipsic the composer of about thirty church cantatas when he died in seventeen fifty he had produced there two hundred and sixty-five more of this staggering total two hundred and ninety five two hundred and two have come down to us as if this were not enough these cantatas incidentally were week to week obligations his years at leipsic account for many secular cantatas six motets five masses including the titanic one in b minor the passions according to st john and st matthew not to mention lost ones the christmas oratorio the resplendent magnificat the easter and ascension oratorios besides clavier works like the italian concerto the goldberg variations the second book of the well-tempered clavier and an incredible mass of other things the rector of st thomas's school during bach's first years in leipzig was johann heinrich ernesti with whom bach's relations were cordial enough though the rector was a slipshod disciplinarian matters remained pleasant enough under johann gesner but presently the latter left st thomas to assume a more profitable post at gttingen his successor johann august ernesti quickly proceeded to stroke bach's fur the wrong way by declaring that altogether too much attention was given to the study of music so you want to be a pot-house fiddler he used to say to youths he found practising the violin it was only a question of time when the surly new rector and the combustible bach would come into collision What has been called the Battle of the Prefects was long drawn out and bitter.

The details need not detain us.

Trouble was intensified by the appointment to a responsible position of a person named Kraus, whom Bach had angrily described as ein liederlicher Hund, a dissolute dog.

Calling to his side his son-in-law, Johann Christoph Otnickel, Bach dictated to him the variation on the chorale When We Are in Our Deepest Need, prophetically bidding him alter the title to With This Before Thy Throne I Come.

On July 18 he suffered an apoplectic stroke and lay for ten days in a desperate state.

at nine in the evening on july twenty eighth seventeen fifty he passed from a world that could barely discern the shadow of his greatness it is excessive perhaps to maintain that for over three-quarters of a century after his death bach went into total eclipse but he was disregarded if not forgotten a handful of musicians indeed remembered him among them some of his talented pupils from time to time a few scattered works of his gained a limited circulation and came in two worthy hands thus in the seventeen eighties several became known in vienna and at the bern van swieten's mozart had occasion to acquaint himself with a few specimens which powerfully stimulated his genius afterwards in leipsic being shown the parts of one of the motets he exclaimed after closely studying them here at last is something from which one can learn beethoven too knew of the well-tempered clavier and even went so far as to ask some one to procure him the crucifixes from the b minor mass his exclamation is well known not bach but ossian shall be his name yet in the latter part of the eighteenth century it was chiefly philip emmanuel not his father to whom one referred when the mighty name was invoked for the sons of bach not the mighty parent embodied the spirit of the time even prior to his death johann sebastian had passed for outmoded and rather hopelessly old hat philip emmanuel went so far as to call his father a big wig stuffed with learning and such was the opinion shared by many of the young bloods in leipzig and elsewhere in a way this was not surprising bach represented a type of music whose complex profundities were giving place to homophony entertainment and the graceful superficialities of the so-called gallant style the new age was concerned with the problems of the sonata and the opera even if bach's scores most of them unpublished had been accessible it is questionable whether the epoch we call classical would have been able to see him in a just perspective In due course, the wheel was to turn full circle, and surely none would have been more amazed than Philip Emanuel, Wilhelm Friedemann, and Johann Christian, could they have known that one day their own works would be looked upon as museum pieces, while the creations of the learned old perruque had become the fountain of musical youth, the perpetual source of strength, and of illimitable self-renewing wonder.

with mendelssohn's revival of the st matthew passion in eighteen twenty nine there began that resurrection which went on increasingly through the nineteenth century headed by the redemptive labours of the bachgesellschaft and which continues to gain momentum right through our own day Boundless as the universe, timeless as eternity, modern as tomorrow, Bach remains from decade to decade what Richard Wagner once called him the most stupendous miracle in all music.

He was asking me about the piano pieces that I was preparing for my audition when I was there to audition.

And I guess one of them was from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, the B-flat minor prelude and fugue.

And he said, oh yeah, that's one of the only extended Picardy thirds that Bach, like it goes on for like two measures.

You don't see that ever in Bach's music.

One scholar dates this fugue to just before 1731, the Italian Concertos, published in 1734.

Are these perhaps the same era? Maybe you recall from our series on Well-Tempered Clavier, book one, where I spoke about how Bach, he likes to prepare a dominant pedal point.

He likes to move the alto voice up chromatically.

Here is what I'm talking about.

This is the alto voice going up chromatically.

Now, I'm only pointing to this because he does this three times, in fact, in the well-tempered clavier, at the same point precisely in the structure, just before you're going to a dominant pedal point.

And since there are only 12 minor fugues, that's 25% of the fugues in a minor key that Bach uses this trick.

That's very fascinating, I think, for us to see...

Yeah.

And I just went to his version of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier.

Yep.

And I just listened to it top to bottom, and it was a million times better than anything the computer could make.