PETER HILL
JS Bach l The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II
For a work that became one of the most influential in music’s history, Bach’s intended use for The Well-Tempered Clavier seems modest: ‘For the profit and use of musical youth desiring instruction, and especially for the pastime of those who are already skilled in this study,’ runs Bach’s introduction on the title page of Book I. This first book of the ‘48’ (as the two volumes together are known) was completed in 1722, a year before Bach moved to Leipzig to take up his appointment as Kantor at the St Thomas School. In his early years in Leipzig Bach was amazingly productive, composing cantatas at the rate of one a week, along with two of his greatest choral works, the St. John Passion (1724), and St. Matthew Passion (1727). From 1726, however, Bach found time to return to keyboard music, and in the 1730s published the first three parts of the Clavier-Übung. By 1738 he seems to have decided to create another set of preludes and fugues in all the major and minor keys, perhaps intended to give his pupils a second volume with more up-to-date styles of keyboard writing. One indication of this is the changed relationship within the pairs of preludes and fugues in Book II of the Well-Tempered Clavier. A number of the preludes anticipate sonata form, being binary movements with fresh developments to start the second half and a clear sense of recapitulation towards the end. These preludes are generally longer than their companion fugues; some others, while not longer, are weightier in musical thought or expression (the pattern for this being established by the C major pair).
The daily study of Bach brings one into contact with a mind of unsurpassed inventiveness. Performers have the endless delight of discovery, experimenting with the balance between voices, through touch or dynamic, to bring fresh facets to light. Chameleon-like, the music seems to work in a variety of tempi or performing styles, each one revealing new layers of associative meaning. And it is a tribute to Bach’s universality that The Well-Tempered Clavier sounds so natural on an instrument he never knew – though he is said to have approved the fortepiano being developed by the famous organ builder, Gottfried Silbermann. As a pianist one comes to Bach with so much music that was indebted to him already in one’s mind and fingers. Bach, indeed, is the great time-traveller of musical history, reaching back to the Renaissance (in the sublime E major fugue, for example) or forward to Beethoven (who played the entire ‘48’ at the age of eleven), Mendelssohn, whose performance of the St. Matthew Passion in 1829 set the seal on the Bach Revival, then Schumann, Liszt, Brahms, Schoenberg and Stravinsky, among so many. I also hear much of Haydn and Mozart in Bach’s keyboard music, especially in Book II, in the way sensibilities are blended and balanced: in dance movements with a hint of melancholy, for example. The exquisite prelude in F minor has the same naivety tinged with anxiety that Mozart found for Barbarina’s aria (also in F minor) in Figaro (memorably echoed by Schubert in his F minor Fantasia for piano duet).
The search for Bach’s intentions leads beyond the score to the instruments for which the ‘48’ was intended, the harpsichord and clavichord, and to the performance practice of his time. Equally revealing are the insights we can gain from manuscript sources into the way the music evolved. In Book II these are so extensive that establishing a definitive text is well-nigh impossible, particularly as there is no complete autograph in Bach’s hand. Many of the movements, as in Book I, are revisions, often very substantial, of earlier music. The first (near complete) manuscript for Book II is the ‘London autograph’ in the British Library (1739–42). Some of this is in the hand of Anna Magdalena Bach (Bach’s second wife) with corrections inserted by Bach. A later copy (1744) by Bach’s pupil and son-in-law J C Altnickol was evidently an attempt to create a finished version, complete with lavish title page. Between these two sources came a lost autograph, whose contents may be inferred from pupils’ copies. Finally, there are later copies by pupils which contain further revisions by Bach, so that the process of refining and perfecting seems to have gone on intermittently right up until his death. Scholarly editions, like those by Richard Jones or Yo Tomita, aim to determine Bach’s latest thoughts, while giving alternative readings from earlier sources. The problem for the performer comes when a revision seems not so much better as different. An example comes in the fugue in B flat major.
The earlier version accompanied the first two bars of the answering entry of the subject with even crotchets, moving smoothly by step in an elegant counterpoint to the subject’s quavers. Bach later replaced the crotchets in the countersubject with quavers, at first sight a fussier solution, but one that serves to underline the difference between the two halves of the subject. Which alternative is better is a matter of taste: but certainly replacing the first version with the revision involves loss as well as gain.
Whatever Bach meant by ‘well-tempered’ – and it was certainly not the modern equal temperament – his system of tuning involved some kind of compromise which meant that all keys became useable. It is worth bearing in mind that many of the preludes and fugues that existed in earlier versions were transposed in order to fit into Bach’s great scheme of traversing all the major and minor keys. Bach would hardly have tolerated a system of tuning that radically altered the music’s character when transposed. On the other hand his tuning must have been sufficiently ‘unequal’ to give a different sonority to different keys, those with fewest sharps or flats sounding more ‘open’ than the remoter keys.
Another difference between the two books of The Well-Tempered Clavier is the way they end and begin. The fugue in B minor that closes Book I is a tour de force, while its
counterpart in Book II is brief and relatively (though deceptively) unassuming. In Book I the opening prelude is famously simple. In Book II, however, Bach went to great lengths to ensure that the C major prelude was very different from its predecessor, the music going through numerous revisions before he was satisfied. The octave pedal-point is a dramatic call to attention, the upper line expanding into a four-voice counterpoint with ideas deriving from the scalic figures in the first two bars. The prelude is based on a much shorter piece composed as early as 1720. Bach’s additions and revisions include the drawn-out ending – another pedal-point – that resolves the prelude’s opening gesture. The ‘flattened’ A that colours the final cadence is contradicted by the fugue’s subject, leaping to an A natural, this fifth note of the subject marked (wherever playable) by a mordent. This is of one of Bach’s simplest fugues, again perhaps in deliberate contrast to the intricacies of the first fugue in Book I. The prelude in C minor opens in the style of an invention, with ideas exchanged between the hands, everything flowing from this simple beginning. The sense of restrained expressiveness carries over into the fugue. Its midpoint is marked by a clear cadence, after which the subject is shadowed by its inversion augmented into longer note-values. A stretto of entries of the subject in close imitation leads to the introduction of the fourth voice, again augmented, in the bass. Later copies by Bach’s pupils end the fugue with a major chord, though
whether in accordance with a change of mind by Bach or simply conforming to the convention of ending minor-key music in the major (the ‘tierce de Picardie’) is impossible to tell. To my mind the minor ending is both more striking and in keeping with the fugue’s grave beauty.
The prelude in C sharp major exists in a copy by Anna Magdalena Bach dated 1739 and in the key of C major. Its similarities to the prelude in C major in Book I lead one to suspect that Bach may originally have intended this prelude to open Book II. Later revisions, besides the transposition to a remote key, added much expressive detail, particularly to the tenor line. But the most remarkable feature is the ending. As the music drifts towards a cadence Bach springs an ambush in the form of a tiny fugato, barely half a minute in duration, but complete with two expositions (the second with the subject inverted) and even an implied stretto as the bass chases up and down the scale using the pattern of the subject. Bach’s sense of the absurd makes the fugue equally unpredictable. The first entries of the subject (the third of which is inverted) overlap, so that the fugue effectively begins with a stretto. It develops as a series of spiky exchanges using the first four notes of the subject, around which coil more lyrical lines of semiquavers sprinkled with demisemiquavers, giving a sense of dandified elegance. A sudden cascade of virtuosity makes a bizarre interruption, dissolving equally abruptly in the final line.
The prelude in C sharp minor is one of the great slow movements of Book II. It uses three distinct though related themes, each introduced by a rising arpeggio. A partial recapitulation then leads to a final section that combines elements of all three themes in an impassioned discourse. The fugue is tricky to play, with the inner voice shared between the hands, and especially awkward when the subject is inverted. The time signature (12/16) implies a lively gigue, but one that is not too rapid as it must accommodate the quieter second theme. This appears at the midpoint (after earlier hints) and is combined in various ways with the original subject, and finally in a stretto.
Bach is unlikely to have envisaged the ‘48’ being performed as a complete cycle. Nonetheless, he seems to have designed the whole with care. Individual preludes and fugues make intriguing pairings, often seeming to be opposite sides of the same coin, while successive pairs seem to make deliberate continuities. This is true of the next six keys, from D major to E minor, beginning and ending brilliantly with the D major prelude and the E minor fugue, the latter made even more emphatically virtuoso in Bach’s revised ending. Most of the preludes in this section are binary in form (with each half repeated). Four of the fugues (in D, E flat and E major, and D sharp minor) are in vocal a cappella style, with the E major fugue being the purest example of stile antico writing in the ‘48’.
The prelude in D major begins exuberantly with a fanfare of bounding triplets. The answering pairs of ‘sighs’ (in quavers, bar 2) should conventionally be interpreted as crotchet-plus-quaver in triplet rhythm, though playing them as even quavers makes a piquant cross-rhythm and may be what Bach intended by his double time-signature. The second section is almost three times the length of the first, with a development in two phases, separated by a cadence in the minor, ending with a plunging scale announcing the reprise. The fugue, in contrast, flows with quiet intimacy. Its subject is treated throughout in stretto, ultimately in a chiming descent that passes down through all four voices. These entries of the subject are linked by smoothly-moving quavers which develop the last four notes of the subject into sequences, the figure so all-pervasive that it occurs no fewer than 104 times. The prelude in D minor exists in a shorter version in a copy dating from 1729. Later revisions added a concertolike brilliance, sharpening the competition between the hands and adding clusters of demisemiquavers. The closing bars make a transition to the fugue as the harmonies fold into a quiet cadence in the major. The fugue is poised between three rhythms: the curling triplets that start the subject together with the chromatically descending quavers that follow, and the semiquavers of the countersubject. The subject lends itself to stretto and stretto-by-inversion, explored in the middle entries, and again in the last line of the fugue for which Bach reserves the richest harmonisation of the subject.
The prelude in E flat major, graceful and dance-like, is a duet between the hands, with occasional enrichment by extra voices. The melodic writing is full of the ambiguities one finds in Bach’s music for solo violin, cello or lute. At times individual lines split into a dialogue between motifs that suggests two voices instead of one; equally, left and right hands may combine into a single line. I prefer the simpler of the alternatives for the final bars, ignoring the repeated bass note found in the copy made by Altnickol. The fugue is calmly spacious. It opens with a single interval in isolation, a rising 5th (E flat to B flat), given a ‘tonal answer’ (B flat to E flat) when the second voice enters. The middle part of the fugue develops the subject in stretto, between tenor and bass, then alto and soprano. The second half of the subject then appears in a meandering sequence before a return of the subject proper in the tenor (with a moment of lovely ‘minor’ colouring), which introduces the sonorous final stretto. The prelude in D sharp minor shows Bach’s melodic invention at its most refined. The opening geometry consists of an upward zigzag and a descending scale. Both figures dissolve and reconfigure into fresh though related ideas. The demisemiquavers that decorate the end of each half indicate a tempo that is thoughtful and unhurried. The fugue is a reminder that Bach’s system of tuning not only allowed him to use this remote key but also to modulate freely within it. The fugue’s central development passes in a majestic arc through
nine entries of the subject, each one changing in tonality and in its harmonisation. This is one of the most profound movements in the ‘48’, a view evidently shared by Bach, given the heightened emotion when the subject returns in the bass with the upper voices massed into chords. The end is like a chorale, with the subject combined simultaneously with its inversion (in the tenor).
The prelude in E major is a study in keyboard touch of extreme delicacy. At the start the upper voices are woven so closely that they almost (but not quite) form a single line. Both halves of this binary movement begin in this way, the voices then separating before coming together over octave leaps in the left hand arranged in a pattern of gentle ricochets. The fugue’s subject borrows from the fugue in E major by Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer contained in his Ariadne Musica, a set of preludes and fugues in 20 keys (published in 1702), an important forerunner of The Well-Tempered Clavier While much of the ‘48’ seems prophetic – the harmony in the fugue in D sharp minor, for example, seems at least a century ahead its time – in the fugue in E major the style harks back to renaissance polyphony. As with the fugues in D and E flat major the subject unfolds through stretto, becoming progressively disguised through alterations to its rhythm and melodic shape. The restoration of the subject in its original form brings one of the sublime inspirations of the ‘48’ as the soprano
floats into the heights. Although a spacious binary movement, the prelude in E minor is another study in economy, everything coming from the semiquavers in the opening two bars (or even from the first bar alone, since the second is its inversion). Though dance-like, the expressive leaps towards the end of each half suggest a tempo with a ruminative or melancholy undertone. A beautiful effect is given by the trills that divide each half at the midpoint. There is some dispute as to whether they should span a tone (F sharp to G sharp, for example) or semitone (F sharp/G natural). I like to think that Bach intended the latter, with its delectable fleeting clash with the melodic voice. The first three-quarters of the fugue come from an earlier version. Between 1742 and 1744 Bach undertook a major revision, perhaps to correct a miscalculation, an insufficiently established return to the home key at the end. The solution was to add 16 bars (these come after a short pause), with a powerful version of the subject in the home key, a cadenza, and a grandly rhetorical final four bars at a slower tempo.
The pairs in F major and minor are forwardlooking, with features of the emerging galant style. The prelude in F major is another study in delicate keyboard technique. As the line spins out from the little turn heard at the outset it leaves a trail of harmony as selected notes are sustained. The fugue is brightly focused, the texture light and buoyant, except where Bach twists the subject momentarily
into the minor just before the effervescent coda. The opening of the prelude in F minor, with its sighing thirds and sixths, could hardly be simpler. But the development of ideas is elegantly ingenious, with the first idea reinvented in various guises as a counterpoint to graceful semiquavers. The fugue is, apart from the C major, the least ‘learned’ in Book II. Its energy comes from the way the subject rebounds from repeated notes in the first two bars, an idea developed in a tuneful episode that appears four times.
The prelude in F sharp major marks a new beginning, with its overture-like dotted rhythms in counterpoint with flowing semiquavers, a pas de deux that becomes increasingly deeply felt. The fugue begins as comedy, as if one were practising the trill at the end of the prelude. Its quirkiness is contained within an unusually balanced design, with its two episodes recapitulated in the second half, in both cases with the upper voices swapping roles. The prelude in F sharp minor is a finely traced arioso. Its most strikingly expressive nuance comes after the return of the melody (after a pause) with a harmonic sidestep onto a ‘Neapolitan’ chord (G major in its first inversion), a moment of stillness from which Bach releases the long descent to the cadence. In the fugue the first of the three subjects is by far the fullest. The second (coming after a cadence in the major) is brief, a four-note descending figure including a dotted
rhythm. The subjects combine, before a new idea in semiquavers drifts in as if decorating the cadence. This turns out, however, to be a subject in its own right, with entries in all three voices. The final section intensifies through a masterly combining of the themes, heard three times in different dispositions between the voices.
The G major pair forms a delightful interlude. The leggiero G major prelude is a teasing game of cross-rhythms. An early version of the fugue (from the 1720s) was handicapped by a prosaic countersubject, Bach’s later replacement matching the lightness of the subject in its skipping rhythms. The music descends to a darker register, escaping with a flourish, before a final delicious arrangement, the subject in the alto, the soprano dropping in syncopations, the bass quasi-pizzicato. In the prelude in G minor the persistent dotted rhythm combines with the slow swing of the underlying harmony as the different permutations of the opening four-note figure draw together over the final pedal-point. The fugue is tensely argued, the subject and its vigorous countersubject sharply opposed. It develops through the gradual discovery that the subject will work as a sort of double-entry in parallel thirds or sixths, to thrilling effect when the countersubject gets the same treatment (from bar 59). Bach made a revealing revision to the final entry of the subject (in the bass), filling in the leaps with semiquavers in a way that suggests a reconciliation of subject and countersubject.
The prelude in A flat major was one of the last movements to be composed. The opening is beautifully conceived for the keyboard, with the harmony in the right hand discernible as three voices thanks to the pattern of syncopation. The answering line of semiquavers flows seamlessly into a second idea whose groups of demisemiquavers (related to the left hand in the first bar) receive extensive development, notably in the long unwinding before the formal cadence of the final bars. The fugue, by contrast, contains some of the earliest music found in Book II. It starts with all but the final bar of a 24-bar fugue written c.1720 (the point at which this ends comes as the music moves to a cadence just after an entry of the soprano voice, added by Bach to disguise the join). The second half moves away from the transparent sonority, exploring the implications of the chromatic countersubject, the final version of which adds a fifth voice to the closing bars. In the richly-coloured prelude in G sharp minor the fascination is in following the flow of material from the opening bars, the winding melody and its answer of sighing thirds and sixths. The fugue very gradually changes in character from its quietly sinuous beginning, partly through the introduction of a second theme at the midpoint and partly because the counterpoints become livelier. By the end the bass has replaced smoothness with swaggering leaps, which nicely anticipate the lively prelude that follows.
The prelude in A major makes me think of a fête galante by Watteau, elegantly pastoral, with an agile bass line supporting a flirtatious duet, especially so where the upper voices change roles in the recapitulation. The mercurial fugue makes much of the dotted (and syncopated) rhythm in the subject, and the double twist (a four-note figure and its inversion) with which the subject ends, later sprinkled with a seasoning of accidentals (an afterthought by Bach). The prelude in A minor is intricate in counterpoint and design, a mosaic formed by developing the ideas in the first three bars. The second half begins with an inversion, but the suggested symmetry is undermined as the ideas become progressively interwoven. The fugue is brief and tumultuous. The granitic subject, beginning with four emphatic crotchets, is run ragged by the countersubject whose closing trill is developed in a powerful ascending sequence that leads to the climactic entries of the subject. Of the possible readings I much prefer an unflinching final chord in the minor with added octave in the bass.
The descending and ascending scales, like softly chiming handbells, that open the prelude in B flat major introduce a movement in relaxed improvisatory vein, full of refined keyboard effects, including hand-crossing where the left hand picks out a line above and below the right. The coda to each half is particularly entrancing, with Bach simplifying the texture to two voices in a delicate dialogue
of contrary and similar motion. The fugue’s subject, though all in quavers, has two distinct figures, the decorated falling arpeggios of the first two bars followed by a rising sequence with slurred pairs. From this busy opening the fugue grows towards a quiet eloquence with the gradual introduction of counterpoints in longer note-values. The pair in B flat minor is one of the most impressive in the ‘48’ and forms the obvious climax to Book II. Its key must have seemed exotically remote in Bach’s time, and is unknown in his instrumental music outside The Well-Tempered Clavier. The theme of the B flat minor prelude underlines the point by quoting (in its second phrase) the melody from the corresponding prelude in Book I. Yo Tomita has pointed out the possible connection between this twenty-second prelude and Psalm 22 whose opening words (‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’) foreshadow the words of the crucified Christ set as a recitative (‘Eli, Eli, lama asabthani!’) in the St. Matthew Passion, a passage that is also in B flat minor. The magnificent fugue has the longest subject in Book II, the motivic details being exhaustively explored in the fugue’s episodes. But its cumulative power comes from the development of the subject in a series of seven stretti: twice with the subject in its original form, twice more in inversion, and then with the original and inversion combined. Bach’s trump card is a double stretto, the original form of the subject in sixths, the inversion in thirds.
The preludes and fugues in B can be heard as a kind of coda, a distillation of the attributes of Book II. The prelude in B major is Bach at his most improvisatory, so much so that (as Yo Tomita has suggested) the music may again take its inspiration from the Psalms, in this case a line-by-line paraphrase on ‘The Lord is my shepherd’ (Psalm 23). Certainly, the mood of joyfulness (‘my cup runneth over,’ in the Psalmist’s words) is unmistakeable. The serenely beautiful fugue has affinities with the Contrapuncti 4 and 10 from The Art of Fugue. The even minims of the subject are lightened by the introduction of the ethereal second theme (in quavers). With the pair in B minor Bach looks back to the
dance movements of Book II. The B minor prelude is another instance of a movement that transforms its character, here from stealthy duet to operatic cantilena, Bach’s later revisions of touch and rhythm adding to the sense of pathos. The subject of the final fugue, with its leaping octaves, suggests a vigorous gigue. But as so often with Bach first appearances deceive. The writing becomes ever more refined, with the subject half hidden in a counterpoint of yodelling semiquavers (bar 29), an exquisite effect that accompanies all subsequent entries. Bach’s farewell to his mighty enterprise is a last understated ingenuity, a tiny stretto disguised by decoration that softly brings down the curtain.
Peter Hill
One of the leading British pianists of his generation, Peter Hill is known for his performances and recordings of twentiethcentury and contemporary music as well as of the classical repertoire. His complete cycles of Messiaen and of Berg, Schoenberg and Webern have received superlative acclaim.The Messiaen was described as ‘one of the most impressive solo recording projects of recent years’ (New York Times), and won Messiaen’s endorsement: ‘Beautiful technique, a true poet: I am a passionate admirer of Peter Hill’s playing.’ Both sets feature in the book 1001 Classical Recordings You Must Hear Before You Die. Other CDs include Messiaen’s Visions de l’Amen (with Benjamin Frith) and two CDs of Stravinsky with the composer’s arrangements of The Rite of Spring and Three Movements
from Petrushka. He has published writings on musical performance, the book Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring (Cambridge) and three books on Messiaen, among them a ground-breaking biography (Messiaen, Yale) which was awarded the Dumesnil Prize by the Académie des BeauxArts in Paris. As well as recitals Peter Hill gives lectures and masterclasses around the world. He holds an honorary professorship at Sheffield University and is a Fellow of the Royal Northern College of Music.
Peter Hill would like to acknowledge his thanks to Tony Bennett, Anne Crookshank, Inja Davidovic, Timothy Day, Celia and Simon Keefe, Jon Kirwan, Adrian Moore, Caroline Rae and Yo Tomita.
