“...That All the Keys Sounded Pure and Agreeable” Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier Book II
Richard Wigmore
Let the Well-Tempered Clavier become your daily bread. Then you will be a thorough musician. —Robert Schumann
It was characteristic of Bach throughout his creative life to take an existing musical genre or technique—the concerto, the cantata, the motet, the Passion, the fugue—and raise it to unprecedented levels of compositional virtuosity. So it was with his most celebrated keyboard work, the two books of The Well-Tempered Clavier, dubbed by conductor Hans von Bülow the “Old Testament” of pianism, to the “New Testament” of Beethoven’s sonatas. The seeds seem to have been sown by the Baden-based composer Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer, who in 1702 published a set of short preludes and fugues in all the major and minor keys—an ambitious undertaking in an era when some “extreme” keys were declared impracticable. Bach knew Fischer’s work and, we might guess, was spurred by the challenge it presented. He evidently began contemplating a similar collection of preludes and fugues around the time of his appointment as kapellmeister to Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen in 1717. In January 1720 he presented his nine-year-old son Wilhelm Friedemann with a “little keyboard book” (Clavier-
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