5 Preludes and Fugues from Das wohltemperirte Clavier Book 2

No.10 in E minor BWV879

No.5 in D major BWV874

No.6 in D minor BWV875

No.12 in F minor BWV881

No.11 in F major BWV880

J.S. Bach was nothing if not thorough. In Cöthen in 1722 he completed a book, The Well-Tempered Clavier, of 24 preludes and fugues in all the major and minor keys. And then over the next 20 years in Leipzig he compiled a second book of 24 preludes and fugues in all the major and minor keys – presumably not in this case to demonstrated the superiority of even-temperament tuning over any other system, since he had already done that in the first book, but for his own interest in meeting the challenge with different material and sometimes in different ways.

The Prelude of No.10 in E minor is in the binary form (in two main sections, each one repeated) much favoured in Book 2. A two-part invention featuring long-sustained trills, it precedes a vast fugue for three voices based on an unusually long subject of extraordinary rhythmic variety. In the Prelude of No.5, as so often with Bach, the key of D major evokes brilliant scoring, applied here to a virtual sonata-form construction with a cadenza before the recapitulation. The D major Fugue is surprisingly (in this context) sober, densely textured in four voices but clearly signposted by the three repeated notes at the start of its subject. Another piece for two voices, the D minor Prelude of No.6 is a nimble moto perpetuo clearly inspired by Vivaldi. The three-voice Fugue is a comparatively short working out of an awkward subject that rises in triplet semiquavers and falls back in a chromatic line of quavers.

No.12 in F minor is one of those – which is by no means all of them – where the Prelude and Fugue seem to have been designed specifically for each other. The Prelude, which has parallels in its modern-style expressivity with the work of the composer’s son Emanuel, sighs in thirds and sixths. The three-voice Fugue dismisses the sentiment in a vigorous bourrée-like treatment of a frankly no-nonsense subject but not without the occasional sigh. No.11 in F major offers a particularly vivid contrast between the Prelude, majestic and yet serene in its fluently accomplished five-voice texture, and the Fugue, a nervy and yet witty gigue in three voices.