The Well-Tempered Clavier: Books I and II, Complete

Johann Sebastian Bach

nën 2012 · Courier Corporation

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"His art was of an encyclopedic nature, drawing together and surmounting the techniques, the styles, and the general achievements of his own and earlier generations and leading to a new perspective." — Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
This informed assessment of the genius of Bach's works can be applied with greatest accuracy to The Well-Tempered Clavier. This highly influential work is monumental in the history of Western music. It represents not only the culmination of Bach's own maturation process, but also the galvanization of the emerging style and structure of modern keyboard music.
The grace and fecundity of The Well-Tempered Clavier have thrilled audiences, musicians, and composers for centuries. Mozart, when rapidly advancing to the height of his mastery, had but to read a manuscript copy of The Well-Tempered Clavier and his style developed a new polyphonic richness and depth of harmony. Beethoven studied all the accessible works of Bach profoundly (including The Well-Tempered Clavier) and frequently quoted them in his sketchbooks, often with direct bearing on his own works. Chopin is nowhere more characteristic than when he shows his love of The Well-Tempered Clavier in his Etudes and Preludes. It was Schumann who, in a series of maxims for young musicians, said "Make The Well-Tempered Clavier your daily bread."
This remarkable volume contains all 48 preludes and fugues, from Books I and II, in all major keys, reproduced directly from the authoritative Bach-Gesellschaft edition. The fine engraving is beautiful, clear, and easy to read. These elegant pieces, which vary in difficulty, are available complete in one low-cost, convenient Dover edition.

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Composer, organist, and the most famous of an illustrious family of German musicians, Johann Sebastian Bach was born in 1685. He was a master of polyphonic baroque music-a musical form characterized by the use of multiple parts in harmony and by an ornate, exuberant style. Bach's father, Johann Ambrosius, taught his son to play the violin at a very early age. At age 10, after both of his parents died, Bach lived with his brother Johann Christoph, an organist, who taught him to play keyboard instruments. Bach's musical genius, however, soon surpassed his brother's skill. During his lifetime, Bach was known more for his skill as an organist than as a composer. His fame as a composer did not come until years after his death, when his works were discovered by the composers Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann and published in the 1800s. Between 1703 and 1717, Bach served as an organist in the German cities of Arnstadt, Muhlhausen, and Weimar. During that time, he wrote chorales, cantatas, concertos, preludes, and fugues, primarily for the organ. These works fused Italian, French, and German characteristics with a profound mastery of the contrapuntal technique. While serving as music director at the court of a German prince from 1717 to 1723, Bach wrote many compositions for the clavier and instrumental ensembles. These included preludes, fantasies, toccatas, and dance suites that served as both music instruction and entertainment. Of these works, the best known is the Well-Tempered Clavier, a series of preludes and fugues composed in 1722 and Bach's last position as cantor and music director of St. Thomas's Church in Leipzig (1724--50), exerted considerable influence on Lutheran church music. During this period, he composed as many as 300 cantatas, 200 of which have been preserved. After his death at the age of 65, Bach became revered as one of the world's greatest composers, and his compositions are regarded by many as the most sublime music ever composed.