Readers may recall that this year began with my learning that Stephen Malinowski had completed his project to create animated visualizations of all of the preludes and fugues in Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier (WTC). At that time it seemed appropriate that I should examine the full scope of this project, forgetting that I had previously viewed the YouTube videos of the first book in July of 2016. This time I divided the first book in half, writing one account on the preludes and fugues from C major to F minor and a second on those from F-sharp major to B minor.
Today I moved on to the second book, which I again plan to divide in half. It is important to bear in mind that the second book is far from “more of the same,” since it was written roughly twenty years after the first. The first was written in 1722 during Bach’s tenure as Kapellmeister for Leopold, Prince of Anhalt-Köthen. Because the prince was a Calvinist that did not believe that original music should distract from worship, most of the music that Bach composed was secular; and much of it was probably intended to hone the techniques for playing different instruments.
Twenty years later Bach was well established in his position as Cantor of the St. Thomas School at the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig. While the church may have been primarily interested in his providing sacred music, his duties as a teacher also included attention to training pupils in instrumental and vocal technique. So the intention behind a second Well-Tempered Clavier book may have been the same as it was at Köthen, even if the context had changed significantly. Furthermore, that context involved not only working with different pupils but also teaching from a far broader foundation of personal experiences in making music.
In that context the second book is as much a retrospective account of the keyboard skills that Bach had cultivated as are other instrumental works from that same period, including the BWV 988 “Goldberg” variations, the BWV 1079 Musical Offering, and the project whose completion was interrupted by his death, the BWV 1080 The Art of Fugue. For example, the second book serves up a generous share of fugue subjects that “push the envelope” of what a subject should be. It seemed as if Bach wanted to explore how few notes could be summoned to determine such a subject, and some of his results are seriously daring. On the other hand his preludes are often more retrospective, going back to the binary-form structures of much of the instrumental music he had been composing at Köthen.
As a result, there are so many features in the second book that go beyond what one has encountered in the first that visualization all but demands a new “tool kit.” On the basis of having now viewed the first twelve prelude-fugue couplings of the second book, I am not sure how well those demands have been met. To be fair, however, part of the problem may have to do with the fact that the soundtracks for these videos all involve harpsichord performance by Colin Booth.
Viewing these videos provided my “first contact” with this performer; and I have to confess that these were some of my less satisfying experiences of listening to Bach’s keyboard music. Most important was that his approach to the repetitions in those binary-form movements were too repetitive, showing little regard for embellishing the second time to distinguish it from the first. Similarly, in the fugues his phrasing often tended to obfuscate the many different roles that a fugue subject could play over the course of the composition. Thus, to the extent that Malinowski was visualizing Booth’s performances (which, clearly, was preferable to trying to visualize the notation as an abstract object), the results were seldom as satisfying as those created for the first book, leading me to wonder whether the acoustic qualities of the piano in the first book were more conducive to visual interpretation than those of the harpsichord for the second book.
The one positive distinction that struck me, however, was that prelude and fugue were joined in a single visualization for all 24 of the keys. My guess is that this did not change the visualization techniques that Malinowski summoned for each of the keys. Rather, it left the impression that the key was the primary focus; and the video explored it consistently from two points of view, one for the prelude and the other for the fugue. To the extent that these are visualizations of performance, rather than notation, there always seemed to be just the right “visual logic” for the transition from prelude to fugue.
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