Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II

In the last decades of his life, while still fulfilling the obligations of director of music at St. Thomas’ Church, Leipzig, and leading the Collegium Musicum, and teaching a number of students, J.S. Bach devoted a substantial amount of time to preparing “finished” versions of the works that he felt to be his best and most important. He revised and prepared fair copies of the St. Matthew and St. John Passions, The Art of the Fugue, a number of chorale preludes, the Inventions and Sinfonias, and The Well-Tempered Clavier. The composer and musicologist Johann Mattheson publicly called on Bach to issue a printed edition of his first set of 24 preludes and fugues, compiled as a testament to the equal temperament system of tuning which had been advanced by the organist Andreas Werckmeister in a treatise of 1691. 

Probably due to the expense of engraving and printing, this never happened, and in fact, the only works published during Bach’s lifetime were The Musical Offering, and the four volumes of the Clavier-Übung, which included the six partitas, Italian Concerto, French Overture, four duets, and the Goldberg Variations. But the preludes and fugues, like the Inventions, were widely disseminated in manuscript copies. A fair copy of the 1722 first volume exists in Bach’s hand, the title page of which reads as follows: 

The Well-Tempered Clavier 

or 

Preludes and Fugues 

through all the tones and semitones 

both as regards the tertia major or Ut Re Mi 

and as concerns the tertia minor or Re Mi Fa. 

For the Use and Profit 

of the Musical Youth Desirous of Learning 

as well as 

for the Pastime of those Already Skilled in this Study 

drawn up and written by 

Johann Sebastian Bach 

p.t. Capellmeister to His Serene Highness the Prince of Anhalt- Cöthen, etc. and Director of His Chamber Music 

Anno 1772 

It was at about the same time that he was composing the Goldberg Variations that Bach assembled his second collection of 24 preludes and fugues, around 1742. Though the only known autograph copy, once the property of Muzio Clementi and now in the British Library, has no title page, copies made by Bach’s students give the title of this second set as The Well Tempered Clavier, Part II. As with the first set, Bach used some pre-existing material. Eleven of the preludes of Part I are reworkings, often extended, of preludes that originally appeared in the Clavierbüchlein written for his son Wilhelm Friedemann. In the second set are a number of preludes and fugues that exist in earlier incarnations dating back to 1722. 

One of the preludes and two of the fugues in the 1742 collection originally were composed in keys different from those in which they were ultimately set. The Prelude and Fugue in C-sharp major was first written in C major (S. 872a ). Perhaps because it was easier in making the transposition simply to add the necessary accidentals, C-sharp major was used rather than the more common D-flat major. The fugue in A-flat major was originally written in F, and it is preserved in that form — under the title Fughetta (S. 901) — coupled with a different prelude. 

Whereas many of the preludes and fugues of the second set seem more extended than their first volume counterparts, and in fact are by and large longer, they are all in three or four voices — none in two or five, as in the first set, and they feature no chromatic subjects, such as that of fugue no. 24 of Part I. Nonetheless, chromaticism is an important feature, as in the subjects of the Fugue in D minor and that in F-sharp major, where the leading tone and lowered seventh are sharply contrasted. Several of the fugues have more than one subject, namely those in B major, G-sharp minor, and C-sharp minor, which have two, and those in F-sharp major and B-flat major, which have three. Some of the preludes of the second set are in the more modern style galant championed by Bach’s sons. Many of the preludes feature rounded binary form, in which the opening theme or idea returns, sometimes quite extensively. 

Ernst Ludwig Gerber wrote the following description of his father Heinrich Nikolaus Gerber’s experiences as a student of Johann Sebastian Bach: 

“At his first lesson Bach set his Inventions before him. When he had studied these through to Bach’s satisfaction, there followed a series of suites, then The Well-Tempered Clavier. This latter work Bach played all together three times through for him with his unmatchable art, and my father counted among his happiest hours, when Bach, under the pretext of not feeling in the mood to teach, sat himself at one of his fine instruments 

and thus turned those hours into minutes.” 

 – Alison Thomas