Prelude in C major

arranged for marimba by Heather Corbett

The first Prelude in the first book of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (completed in Cöthen in 1722) has attracted a multitude of arrangements. This is partly because there is something so fundamental about its broken-chord figuration, which itself derives from a long lutenist tradition, that it sounds natural on just about any instrument or combination of instruments. Indeed, some composers seem to have taken it as a challenge to add their own colours to its three-part texture and to apply their own emotional interpretation to its basically simple harmonic progressions. Charles Gounod, for example, made all kinds of instrumental and vocal arrangements of it, the last of them being the famous Ave Maria which is suffused by a religious sentiment entirely alien to Bach’s original conception.