ExclusiveBach: The Well Tempered Clavier, Book I, Prelude and Fugue No. 23 in B major, BWV 868

【Classical music and nature 古典音樂小站】Johann Sebastian Bach: The Well Tempered Clavier, Book I, Prelude and Fugue No. 23 in B major, BWV 868. 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.

The Well-Tempered Clavier – The conductor Hans von Bülow said it was the ‘Old Testament of every piano player’ and Robert Schumann even spoke of the ‘work of all works’. In fact, Johann Sebastian Bach's ‘Well-Tempered Clavier’ holds a key position in the history of Western music. It is the practical, perfect realisation of a theoretical epochal leap that made the artistic development of the following centuries possible in the first place.
It was a tricky problem. The natural order of intervals, the sequence of which is based on physical oscillation ratios, caused shifts within the tuning of instruments. Twelve fifths layered on top of each other in the given ratio of 2:3, for example, produced a higher note than seven octaves in a ratio of 1:2, which in turn meant that composers' creative flexibility with regard to transposition was immensely limited. This shortcoming had already been described in detail in the 17th century. The organist Andreas Werkmeister even calculated a ‘well-tempered’ tuning in 1691, which made it possible to divide the octave into 12 distinct individual notes by means of small deviations. Nevertheless, acceptance of the new system in the Baroque music world was initially muted, mainly for philosophical and religious reasons. Strictly speaking, the corrected pitch ratios meant an intervention in the natural, divinely ordained order. It was only Johann Sebastian Bach, as a self-confident Protestant, who overcame this and created a cycle for keyboard instruments in 1722 with the first booklet of the ‘Well-Tempered Clavier’ (BWV 846-869), which recorded the change in the compositional paradigm with twelve preludes and fugues arranged chromatically through all keys. It was intended as a teaching work for beginners at the piano, but also as a ‘pastime [for those] already proficient in this studio’ and its importance was further emphasised by the fact that the composer added a second cycle in 1744 (BWV 870-893) based on the same pattern.
The impressively wide range of musical expression, from the solemn to the exuberant, from simple diatonicism to complex chromaticism and clear structuring to dense fugal interweaving, made the collection one of the composer's central and most frequently performed works. Hardly any ambitious amateur or established specialist has refrained from studying the cycles. (Source: klassikakzente.de)

These crystal-clear waters were filmed by Simone Schlegel and edited into a video by Wenjing Ma.





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