Bach_per stud.

il Clav Ben Temp

Assuming one has mastered the 2- and 3-part inventions and has a grasp of the contrapuntal style,
how does one go about learning the WTC?
I know the real answer is by working with an excellent teacher and years of practice, startingly
slowly, yada yada.
I guess I was wondering if anyone has a suggested order of pregressive difficultly, or of a published
companion edition.
Of course this would have to be modified in order to fit one's particular skill level (one pianists
might find a certain prelude easier to begin with than someone else might), but it would be a
starting point.
i have to wonder why you want to learn the whole thing? youd have to REALLY love it, and work
REALLY hard...
I will think about the order of difficulty, but they are more or less all difficult. The preludes are of
course much easier than the fugues. I would start with book I and just follow the numbers. I may
come back here in a couple of weeks time.
This is highly intellectual music as well, so spend a lot of time away from the piano working on the
score before actually practising it at the piano.
I suggest you go through these three excellent books:
Basic:
Eric Astschuller Bachanalia The essential listeners guide to Bachs Well tempered clavier
(Little Brown)
Intermediate:
Ralph Kirkpatrick Interpreting Bachs Well-tempered clavier (Yale University Press).
Advanced:
Siglind Bruhn JS Bachs Well tempered clavier: In depth analysis and interpretation (4 volumes)
(Mainer International Ltd)
1.There is no evidence that Bach considered the WTC as a cycle to be performed in its entirety.
Quite the opposite, all the evidence is that in his time (and his pupils according to his teaching)
would not even pair the preludes and fugues.
2.The WTC again according to all evidence available at present was never intended for public
performance (Bach composed plenty of other works for that purpose). Rather these were
teaching/studying pieces.
3.However and here there is a very wrong assumption what they were intended to teach was
most emphatically not keyboard technique, that is finger dexterity, hand independence and so on.
But rather music in its most comprehensive meaning.
4. A student of Bachs time would derive the following understandings from working on the WTC:

a. Theory and harmony: how to create motifs; how to develop them; relationship between keys;
musical patterns (arpeggios, scales, broken chords, etc.); how to structure fugues, etc.
b. Composition: based on the above, how to compose ones own prelude and fugue, with Bachs
own serving as models and inspiration.
c. Tuning. Musicians had to tune their own instruments at the time. In order to play the WTC one
needed to be versed in Bachs own well-temperament system (which by the way is lost: we do not
know how he tuned his instruments). You cannot play the WTC in the usual temperaments of the
time, and that was a turning point in muscal history that eventually lead to the supremacy of equal
temperament (although Bach and his contemporaries did not use equal temperament as we know it
today). This is particularly important for the WTC I, but possibly less so for WTC II composed 20
years later by which time equal temperament (well temperament) was pretty much established.
d. Keyboard technique. Which of course was catered for as well.
e. These understandings were taken for granted at the time: the division between performing and
composing is a very recent phenomenon. In fact other keyboard works like the Little preludes, the
Inventions and the Sinfonias shared the same aims.
From all that, it necessarily follows that if you truly want to squeeze from these pieces all that you
can, the analysis and study of preludes and fugues, composing similar pieces, and improvising in
their style, and even may be trying your hand at tuning a clavichord (the most common house
instrument, Bachs favourite keyboard instrument after the organ, and arguably the instrument the
WTC was intended for) should make part of your study. (Several modern manufacturers of
historical instruments make clavichords at a surprisingly reasonable price. If you have never played
one, it is quite a shock how fragile they are, and how soft their sound is).
5. The most likely scenario for the performance for the WTC in Bachs time would be with the
keyboardist playing a selected prelude or fugue (not necessarily paired) and discerning the several
voices by associating them with the hand and finger movement/distribution. The actual sound was
used to delight in the blending[i/] and bringing up one voice above the others, or pointing out
through accenting the entries of the theme would have been considered in bad taste and
patronising. Meanwhile the students listening would have a copy of the piece in their laps in order
to visually follow the separate voices, while their ears would get the blending of it all. Most likely
the piece would be repeated several times to let the students hear the several motif
manipulations. The modern way of performing the WTC by playing it once and with the audience
without a clue about what is going on which forces the perform into systematically destroying the
subtlety and complexity of these pieces by forcibly hammering down separate voices and showing
by soundthe different entries of a theme must make Bach turn several times in his grave. These
pieces are not about a nice tune (although they do have superb tunes). These are intricate
tapestries of sound, and they are for the cognoscenti. One must study and study hard before one
starts to glimpse what they are all about, let alone appreciate them properly.
This is not very different from wine appreciation. You would be unlikely to share a bottle of
Chateaux Margaux with some ignoramus whose idea of a satisfying meal is a Big Mac with double
chips and coke.
6. Personally, I think that the preludes are the real technical exercises (many of them are not that
different in structure form Czerny), while the fugues are the musical tour de-force, since there is
no more difficult form in which to compose. There is some evidence for that in the fact that 11 of
the preludes of the WTC1 first appear in the Little notebook of W.F Bach, which Bach wrote for his
sons keyboard instruction.
7. The order in which they appear (chromatically) most likely is simply because it makes it easier
to find a particular prelude in the book. Bach himself almost certainly taught them in a different
order. See this thread for more details:

http://pianoforum.net/smf/index.php/topic,5143.msg49995.html#msg49995
8.Summing it all up:
a.No, I would not start with the most difficult prelude and fugue. I would start with the easiest and
proceed in an ascending order of difficulty, since in this way one P&F prepares for the next. The list
I provided is the one I use, but it is by no means a definitive or in any way an authoritative list. In
fact I would be most interested in seeing alternative listings.
b.Personally, I always learn/teach the prelude paired with its fugue. But again, this is a purely
personal bias. As I said there is no evidence (even of a musical nature) that says they should be
played together.
c.In learning these pieces, the best way is to do a motif analysis (since this was Bachs preferred
mode of composition) and learn first the motifs, then the separate voices and finally the whole
piece. At each of these steps (motif-voices-full piece) it is usually not necessary to work HS, it is
perfectly possible to do HT straightaway. But this depends on the student.
d.Technically, fingering is the most important consideration, and it will all hinge on articulation. So
before deciding on fingering one must decide on articulation. This is by no means an easy task,
since Bach left precious little information about it and the experts more or less all disagree.
e.Here are a few references that I found particularly useful (tip of the iceberg):
i.Ralph Kirkpatrick Interpreting Bachs Well Tempered Clavier (Yale University Press).
ii.Paul Badura-Skoda Interpreting Bach at the Keyboard (Oxford University Press).
iii.Frederick Iliffe: Analysis Of Bach's 48 Preludes & Fugues (2 vols. Novello)
iv.Joseph Groocock - Fugal Composition: A Guide to the Study of Bach's '48'. (Greenwood Press)
v.David Ledbetter - Bach's Well-tempered Clavier: The 48 Preludes and Fugues. (Yale University
Press)
Also have a look here:
http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~tas3/wtc.html
9. And last but not least, keep in mind Bachs own words:
Composed for music-lovers, to refresh their spirits