It is a very fortunate thing, for those to whom getting
to know the music of J.S. Bach better is close to the
heart, that posterity has in its possession copies of
many of Bach's works in preliminary versions, quite
unlike the versions upon which he eventually put his
stamp of approval. Only through comparison can one
really begin to appreciate the way that the man worked,
how he thought through his music, and what kinds of
decisions he made and later unmade as he trudged
through the sometimes l...(+)
It is a very fortunate thing, for those to whom getting
to know the music of J.S. Bach better is close to the
heart, that posterity has in its possession copies of
many of Bach's works in preliminary versions, quite
unlike the versions upon which he eventually put his
stamp of approval. Only through comparison can one
really begin to appreciate the way that the man worked,
how he thought through his music, and what kinds of
decisions he made and later unmade as he trudged
through the sometimes long and arduous process of
composing a piece of worthy music. The Prelude and
Fugue in G minor, BWV 535 is one such
multiple-version-surviving piece. BWV 535a, the early,
very different, and incomplete version of the work, is
thought to have been composed sometime before Bach took
the job of organist in Weimar (before 1708); the final
version, BWV 535, is almost certainly a product of
those Weimar days and, thus, might well be separated
from its predecessor by as many as ten or 12 years.
As it stands in its final version, the Prelude of BWV
535 is a florid, flexible 43-measure mock-improvisatory
essay, a series of seamless and propulsive arpeggio
figurations separated from one another by brilliant
scales and rounded off at the end by a paragraph of
thick imitative polyphony. The early version is, on the
other hand, quite a different beast: It begins with
nearly the same two-measure burst (a few notes have
been tinkered with), but then takes shape as a smaller
and less electrifying series of phrases that never move
away from G minor and never achieve any real momentum,
though the middle two phrases, with their buoyant and
incessant dotted rhythm, have an undeniable charm to
them.
The Fugue of BWV 535a, the early version, never made it
past its 65th bar. When composing BWV 535 proper, Bach
took up these 65 original bars of music and subjected
them to a number of superficial alterations: the
contrapuntal framework remains unchanged, as does the
subject itself, but a number of rhythms and notes are
changed here and there, and a few measures were almost
entirely rewritten in order to better get from point A
to point B. He added 12 more bars to finish off the
last subject statement (in the pedals, which had broken
off in mid-stride in BWV 535a) and provide the usual
showy, cadenza-like coda.
One additional interesting change might be noted: In
BWV 535a, the G minor key is notated in the old manner,
a single flat in the key signature, while in the
finished BWV 535 of a decade or so later, Bach adopts
the more modern two flat key signature for G minor.
PARTITION