Angela Hewitt BACH The Well-Tempered Clavier (8, 9, 10 & 11 /15)

If one had to decide on the most influential works by Bach over the years since his death, the two most likely choices might be the St Matthew Passion and The Well-Tempered Clavier. While it was the Passion that—in Mendelssohn’s arrangement and ‘first’ performance of 1829—catapulted Bach into the forefront of German musical culture, the influence of The Well-Tempered Clavier has been more continuous, widespread and often hidden from the glare of publicity. What is remarkable for a work so old is that so many music lovers, musicians, composers and scholars of all levels have consistently found something worthwhile in it. This breadth of purpose is evident in Bach’s title page for the first volume: ‘For the profit and use of musical youth desiring instruction, and especially for the pastime of those who are already skilled in this study.’ In other words, Bach himself designed the collection as something to be both supremely instructive and also pleasurable. The lexicographer Ernst Ludwig Gerber recalled that his father had heard these pieces at first hand, played by Bach himself; the composer apparently played through the collection three times during the course of their lessons, after both had tired of more formal study. Much of Bach’s later output seems to have been designed to provide authoritative examples, counteracting the growing taste for music that catered primarily to ephemeral fashions. But, almost paradoxically, many aspects of The Well-Tempered Clavier pointed as much to the future as to the past. Most obvious is Bach’s comprehensive survey of all the keys available within the tonal system. Although these had been theoretically possible for over a century, it was only relatively recently that keyboard instruments had been tuned in such a way as to render the less familiar keys more usable. Moreover, the very technique of keyboard fingering (and the standard proportions of keyboards) had hitherto excluded keys employing a large number of sharps and flats. A few composers before Bach had come close to covering most keys in a single collection (J C Fischer’s Ariadne musica of 1702 was an obvious influence on Bach) and the theorist Johannes Mattheson gave short examples in every key, but not fully fledged pieces. The complex genesis of Bach’s collections shows that he experimented with several ways of grouping pieces by key, before settling on the final scheme of covering the entire chromatic scale, from C, with the pieces presented in first the major and then the minor mode.
The very genre of ‘Prelude and Fugue’ might not have become so firmly established without Bach’s two encyclopaedic cycles. He inherited from older generations the genre of the ‘Praeludium’ (alternatively ‘Fantasia’ or ‘Toccata’), a loose amalgam of free and fugal elements that can alternate in unpredictable ways. Certainly, there was an increasing tendency to distill these two elements into two separate pieces, but, in Bach’s youth, this was still only one option among several. What probably appealed to Bach about the pairing of prelude and fugue was the fact that these two corresponded to the two main sides of his musical personality. On the one hand, he was renowned well beyond his homeland as a supreme virtuoso performer who could improvise with total spontaneity (a fact that is all too easily forgotten today when he is often labeled as a ‘composer’s composer’); on the other, he was undoubtedly the greatest musical thinker of his age, someone who could see inventive potential in any theme and who relished working out his thoughts on paper. The prelude–fugue pairing thus encapsulates Bach’s spontaneous, performative urge together with his more abstract, compositional thought. But it would be a mistake to suggest that all the preludes are ‘free’ and all the fugues are serious and ‘strict’. Indeed, having made the initial distinction, Bach positively relished mixing up these categories: a fugue might sound as characterful or carefree as a prelude, and a prelude may contain the complex musical devices that would normally be associated with fugue. One of the greatest aspects of Bach’s achievement as a composer was his ability to explore and ‘research’ a genre to a depth well beyond the norms of the day.
While it is customary to believe that Bach’s reputation plummeted in the latter half of the eighteenth century, this is really only true of his outward public image. For works such as The Well-Tempered Clavier had tremendous influence ‘behind the scenes’: Beethoven could play large sections by the age of eleven, and Mozart kept it close to hand throughout the last decade of his life. The fact that such seminal figures had access to the work before it was available in print (the first editions appeared over fifty years after Bach’s death) suggests that there must have been an extremely healthy network of manuscript copies. Soon after The Well-Tempered Clavier entered the public field at the outset of the new century, the concept of grouped preludes, often with pedagogic intention, became commonplace: witness the plethora of preludes (or ‘studies’) from composers such as Czerny, Chopin, Debussy, Hindemith and Shostakovich.
Why did such seemingly complex and ancient music rise to fame in the age of Romanticism? Schumann viewed The Well-Tempered Clavier as a collection of ‘character pieces’, thus aligning them with his own value system. But many of the pieces are indeed ‘character pieces’, in that they grasp a particular affect, compositional device or quality of movement, exploring this to the finest detail. If each piece is bound by ‘rules’, these are rules developed for this piece alone, often in the course of its individual progress. What to Bach may have been an exploration of the implications of a single inventive complex seems to have struck the Romantic generation as the manifestation of a certain refinement of spirit accessible only through the greatest of music, an individuality intimating a broader universality. Bach’s seemingly archaic musical world, steeped in an all-embracing religious order and sharing concepts of music that stretch back to Pythagorean times, was born afresh in the new era of Romantic aesthetics, and has remained an indispensable element of Western culture ever since.