The Prelude & Fugue in C Major (BWV 531) is an early
work by Johann Sebastian Bach that almost certainly
predates the composer's move to Weimar in 1708, J.S.
Bach's Prelude and Fugue in C major, BWV 531 is music
of a most exuberant kind. The propulsive opening
thought of the Prelude, a kind of rapid-note
alternation in the pedals that rises by way of
arpeggiation, has an aspect of joyous, celebratory
brass fanfare to it. The Fugue's subject, though
technically built from a different interval pat...(+)
The Prelude & Fugue in C Major (BWV 531) is an early
work by Johann Sebastian Bach that almost certainly
predates the composer's move to Weimar in 1708, J.S.
Bach's Prelude and Fugue in C major, BWV 531 is music
of a most exuberant kind. The propulsive opening
thought of the Prelude, a kind of rapid-note
alternation in the pedals that rises by way of
arpeggiation, has an aspect of joyous, celebratory
brass fanfare to it. The Fugue's subject, though
technically built from a different interval pattern, is
right from the same page, gesture- and rhythm-wise, as
that first thought of the Prelude (it is also, one
might add, a very peculiar fugue subject). When, before
they have even had a chance at the subject, the pedals
interrupt the Fugue's contrapuntal texture with a
measure of bursting-at-the-seams broken octaves (to
which the upper voices respond with six-voice chords
--there is no strict maintenance of the four-voice
texture here), it is a magical moment in the organ
repertory. As he so often does, Bach finishes this
organ fugue with a brief quasi-cadenza, the likes of
which has already been heard at the end of the Prelude
as a kind of bridge to the Fugue.
PARTITION