Sir András Schiff

“...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- büchlein) into which he wrote pieces designed to hone technical skills and musical understanding. These include early versions of the Two- and Three-Part Inventions, some copied by Wilhelm Friedemann himself, and of eleven of the first twelve preludes of what became Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier.

By 1722 the eleven preludes, expanded and, in some cases, transposed into the more abstruse keys, had become 24 fully fledged preludes and fugues, arranged in chromatically ascending key sequence. The title page of Bach’s fair copy proclaims the music’s purpose: “The Well-Tempered Clavier, or Preludes and Fugues through all the tones and semitones… For the profit and use of musical youth desirous of learning and especially for the enjoyment of those already experienced…” The first book duly became Bach’s prime teaching material, both for Wilhelm Friedemann and, later, Carl Philipp Emanuel, and for his more advanced pupils.

While Bach seems to have conceived the preludes and fugues of both books of The Well-Tempered Clavier primarily in terms of the harpsichord (though some work well on the organ), his use of the generic term “clavier” indicates that he wanted to make them available to players of any keyboard instrument—harpsichord, clavichord, organ, spinet. No one can be completely sure exactly what he meant by “well-tempered.” Scholars agree that it is unlikely to denote our modern temperament, with its twelve equalized semitones. One possible clue comes from Bach’s obituary, written by his second son Carl Philipp Emanuel and his pupil Johann Friedrich Agricola: “In the tuning of harpsichords he achieved so correct and so pure a temperament that all the keys sounded pure and agreeable. He knew no keys which, because of impure intonation, should be avoided.”

While ensuring that all 24 keys, even ones as outré as C-sharp major and D-sharp minor, were tolerable to the ear, Bach’s tuning system would have made some keys more “well-tempered” than others. The resulting differences of color and character, including a degree of harshness in keys such as C-sharp and F-sharp major, with their relatively sharp major thirds, are inevitably lost in today’s equal temperament.

Twenty years elapsed before Bach completed what he dubbed, simply, “twenty-four new preludes and fugues” in Leipzig in 1742. Two years later his pupil and future son-in-law Johann Christoph Altnickol copied them out and appended the title The Well-Tempered Clavier Book II. Several of these pieces date back to Bach’s Köthen years; others were added between 1738 and 1742, a period dominated by Clavierübung Part III and the so-called “Goldberg” Variations. Like Book I of what has come to be known as “The 48,” the new collection circulated widely in manuscript and was certainly known to composers such as Mozart and Beethoven. But it was only published complete, in three separate editions, in 1801–2. The autograph belonged to the pianist-composer Muzio Clementi in the early 19th century, and today is housed in the British Library. The first English edition, published in instalments, gives recommendations on how to study the preludes and fugues, warning players not to tackle those in C-sharp major, E-flat minor and (curiously) F minor too soon “because they are set in Keys less in Use in England than upon the Continent, and therefore at first puzzling.”

Bach’s was a famously encyclopedic nature. And like its predecessor, Book II of The Well-Tempered Clavier is dazzling in its diversity, not only of style and technique but also of expressive scope. This is music that challenges the mind and fingers, touches the heart and celebrates the joy of bodily motion. As with Book I, Bach’s purpose was both to instruct and give delight. His keyboard students learnt to read and play in all keys, across the widest possible gamut of idioms and textures. His composition pupils could study all the essential contrapuntal techniques in styles ranging from the Palestrina-inspired stile antico to the most fashionably up-to-date.

The preludes in Book II are generally on an ampler scale than their counterparts in the first book of the 48, and are usually cast in binary form, with two repeated halves. In contrast to the serene simplicity of the famous C-major Prelude in Book I, its counterpart in Book II is a grand, richly textured affair that unfolds over an octave pedal bass—a characteristic organ technique. Some of the preludes, including those in C-sharp minor, D major and D-sharp minor (a toccata-like two-part invention), are in an embryonic sonata form, with a recapitulation of the opening material (could Bach have been influenced here by Domenico Scarlatti’s sonatas?). Reflecting their later date, they tend to be more modern, often more vocal, in style than those in Book I—a reminder that a few years earlier Bach had remarked that “the former style no longer seems to please our ears.” Sometimes, as in the “sighing” preludes in F minor (popularized by the Swingle Singers) and G-sharp minor, the music suggests the empfindsamer Stil (literally “sensitive style”) being cultivated by Bach’s sons Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel.

Bach is at his most uninhibitedly extrovert in the D-major Prelude, with its trumpeting arpeggios (the whole piece seems orchestrally conceived), and the concerto-like Prelude in B major. The F-sharp minor is a vocally inspired arioso, while the preludes in E-flat major (which may have originally been conceived for lute) and A major— a gigue—have a charming pastoral flavor. The delicious G-major Prelude—harmonically the simplest of the set—evokes pealing bells.

In extreme contrast are the preludes in A minor and B-flat minor. The former is a two-part invention that pushes chromaticism to its 18th-century limits, while the latter is a three-part invention of veiled melancholy that sets the scene for its austere, withdrawn fugue. Bach also conjures the sound of bells in the C-sharp major Prelude, which begins with the kind of broken arpeggio pattern familiar from Book I and ends with a chirpy little three-part fughetta —perfect preparation for the wittily skipping fugue that follows.

While all the fugues of Book II are in three or four parts, their expressive and stylistic range is, if anything, wider than those in Book I. Representing the purest, strictest stile antico is the E-major Fugue, whose solemn (and sole) subject derives from an old chant. Johann Fischer had used a virtually identical subject in his own E-major Fugue; and we can sense Bach setting himself the challenge of seeing how many permutations of the subject he could create, often in diminution (i.e., with shorter note values). He also far outstrips Fischer in the range of his modulations.

Ancient meets modern in the massive, inward-looking D-sharp minor Fugue, memorably described by musicologist Donald Tovey as “an Aeschylean chorus.” The A-minor Fugue is based on essentially the same angular chromatic subject used by, inter alia, Handel in “And with his stripes we are healed” and Mozart in the Kyrie of the Requiem.

On the whole, though, the fugues of Book II, however contrapuntally intricate, are more consistently “modern” in feeling than those in Book I. From the playful C-major Fugue—Bach at his most puckish—and the bouncy Fugue in C-sharp major, galant charm and elegance are often to the fore. Several are in the rhythm of a gigue, distinctly skewed in the E-minor (you can imagine Beethoven relishing this knotty fugue), airborne in the F-major, perhaps the most delightfully frivolous fugue Bach ever wrote. The G-major Fugue, especially, reveals Bach’s absorption of the contemporary Italian style, while others are based on French dance rhythms: the F-minor Fugue is a bourrée, the F-sharp minor a gavotte, the B-flat major a serenely flowing minuet.

As if in deliberate reaction to its monumental counterpart in Part I, the closing B-minor Fugue is a frolicking passepied, livelier cousin of the minuet: another nod towards the newly fashionable galant style and confirmation, if it were still needed, that the minor mode in Bach can be a vehicle for inspired levity as well as sorrow or disquiet.

Richard Wigmore is a writer, broadcaster, and lecturer specializing in Classical and Romantic chamber music and lieder. He writes for Gramophone, BBC Music Magazine, and other journals, and has taught at Birkbeck College, the Royal Academy of Music, and the Guildhall. His publications include Schubert: The Complete Song Texts and The Faber Pocket Guide to Haydn.