J. S. Bach – The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I

Excerpt from the CD booklet essay by Trevor Stephenson:

Sometime around 1720, when Johann Sebastian Bach was in his mid- thirties, he completed a large-scale work for keyboard—a complete set of preludes and fugues in all the major and minor keys; he entitled this The Well-Tempered Clavier.1 The work was not commissioned, and Bach never had it published. Rather, he used it as a teaching piece for his pupils and his musical children who had progressed beyond the Inventions and Suites. As genuine as Bach’s pedagogic intent was, it cannot help but make us smile today that perhaps the greatest single work ever written for the keyboard came from such modest aims.

The Well-Tempered Clavier is comprehensive in its affective and spiritual scope as well as in its contrapuntal technique, and was designed to inspire and require a great deal of devotion and dedication from the student and the listener to unwrap its mysteries. I believe it was intended as a musical “daily bread” or a devotional— to be approached each day with a sense of growing skill, understanding, and wisdom. If we were to translate it into the world of painting, The Well-Tempered Clavier might combine Vermeer’s sanctity of the everyday with Brueghel’s uncompromising and gnarled scenes of peasants, folktales, country life, and biblical drama and allegory. Idealism, pragmatism, craftsmanship, religious concentration, and the work-a-day world are all rolled into one. To Bach, as it was to Brueghel and Vermeer, beauty and moral truth are intrinsic.