Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Bach's Little Preludes

I love Bach, but I'm kinda burnt out on Anna Magdalena's Notebook. I think I might be ready to try an easy prelude, so does anyone have suggestions of which ones might be best to start with?

I'm thinking of getting this edition because it seems to have helpful supplemental material, as well as a CD (I'm pretty insolvent & thus working by myself, so I need all the help I can get).
Amazon: J. S. Bach - 18 Short Preludes
Are there other options with good supplementary material that I should consider instead/as well?

I also have recording of the Little Preludes by Glenn Gould & Angela Hewett. Are there others I should be on the lookout for? Any interesting articles to read, or instructive videos I should look up on Youtube?

Any other suggestions or tips anyone might think of are very welcome.

Sounds like a good idea to me, they are very playable, but offer scope for improvement. After a 20 years hiatus from the piano, I found the little preludes were a great way to get reacquainted with Bach. I had the greatest difficulty with numbers 4 and 6, until I got out my highlighters and coloured in the various voices! I found no. 2 to be the easiest, but they all have their challenges. I got as far as no. 8 so I can't really give you more in the way of suggestions.
Btw, I bought the edition you are considering, without the CD (but I am taking lessons). I found it easy to read, and the section on ornamentation was helpful.

Many teachers recommend the Little Preludes as a transition from the AM Notebook to the Inventions and Sinfonias (also known as the Two-Part and Three-Part Inventions) or the French Suites. The Alfred editions are very good student resources for all of these.

I recommend watching this too. (it has more parts if you want to follow on it) I've studied 2 of the LPs so far, they are amazing and helped me progress nicely. I recommend beginning with Prelude in E minor, BWV 941. It is not the easiest one in the book but it is only 1 page and it contains a lot of things that will serve as stepping stones for the next bach preludes you decide to learn.

A lot of people are not aware that Bach also compiled a book of simple pieces for his son Wilhelm.

http://www.sheetmusicplus.com/title/Notebook-For-Wilhelm-Friedemann-Bach/2449914

It has a bunch of great works to play that are not too difficult.

More details are here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...lm_Friedemann_Bach_.28924.E2.80.93932.29

(This is not directed at you Tedor, so please don't be offended)

That is an absolutely terrible performance of the 1st two-part invention. I can't for the life of me understand why people think she is such a great Bach interpreter.

It is somewhat ironic that in this lecture she advises against an overly romantic Bach style:



Now compare this to a good interpretation of Bach



I think the contrast between these two videos really puts into perspective how "good" a Bach interpreter she really is.

I am not at all offended. I just found some of her tips useful and I enjoyed her playing too. For example bringing out certain voices, when you should consider playing legato and when detached... I couldn't judge her playing at this stage as I am not as competent at this point.

I try not to dismiss anyone's style or interpretation because it's so subjective. One person likes it, another doesn't and they all have their reasons.

Hi everyone, I'm new around here....

I'm just returning to the piano after 35 years away from it (I had just under two years of lessons as a young teenager, with piano as second instrument).

Bach is my favourite, and I too have started looking at the preludes. I suppose you could say I'm on the 'better piano playing though Bach' path, and the preludes is my current stage.

I kicked off with the Prelude (only) in C major from the Well Tempered Clavier book 1 (the only piece in the WTC within my range at present, I'd imagine). A lovely piece. Given that this is perhaps the only WTC piece you'd play for a while, it's probably worth finding the sheet music (legally) online rather than buying the book. For example, here at the public domain Mutopia project:
http://sca.uwaterloo.ca/Mutopia/cgibin/make-table.cgi?Composer=BachJS
It's BWV 846
This doesn't have fingering, but I've found there are no major fingering issues in this piece, and I'm happy to share. (I do always mark fingering, and try to play consistently.)

I'm now working on BWV999, the 'prelude for lute'. A little more challenging when you get to the second page, with left-hand jumps (always to the same note, though!), but I reckon it's good practice :-)
This is in my book J S Bach, Kliene Praludien und Fughetten (G. Henle Verlag collection), which has 26 preludes and fugues.

On Sunday I had a go at playing both of these on a double manual harpsichord belonging to a friend, which was pretty magical, and a little challenging as I'd never had a go on a harpsichord before, and I'd never played in front of anyone - let alone an expert harpsichordist! - before. I've found it to be very motivating to have this amazing instrument to go and play on when I'm - ahem - 'ready' i.e. when I can play something passably.

I've also just started looking at BWV 924 (from the collection for W. Fr. Bach), which is also from the same Verlag collection. Suggested by my harpsichordist friend, and then we discovered it was the first one in the Verlag book.

After that perhaps BWV 926 and some simple hands together :-)

My ultimate objective is the WTC (such as No. 3 in C minor from book 1) and similar material, and no doubt the Inventions will be the stage before that. And if I get that far I may get a harpsichord :-)

You'll notice a pattern with the Preludes I've started with: you don't, by and large, have to think about LH and RH at *exactly* the same moment. So with these pieces I'm not learning RH and LH separately (though I will do with the next pieces).

I've found it very useful to listen to various interpretations of each piece as I've started to learn it (piano/harpsichord/clavichord on CD, Youtube, different interpreters such as Gould), so that I know I'm on vaguely the right lines and I can see the range of what seems permissible in terms of speed, what the performer is bringing out in the music etc.

I've also started to play each piece in different ways: different speeds, softly, staccato and so on. My plan now is to memorise each piece as I learn it, and I'm surprised how much of it is sinking in, even at my advanced age. I started learning 999 last week, and the first page already seems to be 95% memorised without me having really planned to achieve that.

I bought a metronome, but only use it occasionally to determine how fast someone else is playing, and how fast I am playing (for a few bars). In other words to scare myself ;-). Then I put it away, and a week later I've found I've really speeded up without too much effort.

What I like about this material - apart from the music itself, which is lovely - is that it does make the left hand do some proper work, and the LH is my weak point as most of my training was violin, so my bass clef was never so secure, and I have just had to re-learn reading the bass clef. I may deliberately choose preludes that have lots of LH work, to make up this deficit.

I'm currently working without a teacher but plan to start lessons in the autumn - though it's actually been quite difficult finding a teacher with free slots that I can do...

If you'd like to discuss certain Bach preludes, detail on fingering or whatever in certain pieces, please do post here!

Eglantine I like your motivation and positive approach! I want to one day play pieces from the WTC too and also the inventions.

My biggest issue with these preludes has been keeping the tempo constant. As soon the 16th notes start I tend to go play too fast and I am having trouble counting through them.

Teodor, I realise myself how much my tempo varies when I put on the metronome. But then it's the same when I put on a CD of some harpsichordist - although the variation there tends to be in a narrower band! So it's clear none of us is clockwork ;-)

I think I'll leave sorting out the regularity of tempo until I have a piece memorised to perfection.

I'm slightly confused by the term Little Preludes, as the Verlag book I have contains four different sets of them, with the same numbers (1-6, 1- 1-7 etc.)... Thanks for the recommendation on 941.

Here's part of Williard Palmer's explanation of the origins of the pieces usually called Little Preludes or, sometimes, Short Preludes (from J. S. Bach: 18 Short Preludes for the Keyboard (2nd ed.), Alfred Publishing, 1992):

"The Twelve Short Preludes were first collected and published in the middle of the 19th century by F. K. Griepenkerl, who arranged them in ascending order of keys. . . . The Six Short Preludes were first published by Hoffmeister and Kühnel, edited by J. N. Forkey."

These pieces were not composed by Bach as a set. Seven of them are from the Clavier-Büchlein vor Wilhelm Fridemann Bach. The others are apparently preserved only in copies from some of Bach's friends and students. The Alfred/Palmer edition follows the historical publishing precedent by presenting them as a set of twelve followed by a set of six.

While I don't recognize Angela Hewitt as the foremost authority of playing JS Bach on the piano, I think she is a very sensitive player of Bach's music. There are so many arguments about how JS Bach's music should be played, and most miss some point or other by a wide margin. It's been over 250 years since anyone actually heard JS Bach play. We have many good historical treatises on how music was played in the Baroque era, and Bach himself noted ornamentations in a few very important works with such precision that we can surmise much about how he treated certain types of passages.

Bach is thought to have seen and played a very early example of a pianoforte, and not to have liked it... that doesn't mean that he wouldn't have loved a more advanced piano like we've had since the middle 1800's. True, he didn't have dynamics to work with on the harpsichord, but there were a huge arsenal of expressive tools that a harpsichordist (and organist) had at their disposal for expression, and we have good historical documentation of these techniques. Anyone who thinks that JS Bach meant his music to by played in a purely mechanical fashion like a programmed MIDI, is sadly misinformed, and any decently educated musicologist with a major of study in the Baroque era will affirm this.

The challenge for a pianist playing Bach's keyboard works, or transcriptions for the piano, is to play using a combination of the general musical interpretation for orchestral instruments (which have dynamic variation) and yet blend that with the subtle rubato that a keyboardist would have used, and yet not make a Baroque piece sound like a Classical or Romance era piece. I think that Angela Hewitt does a spectacular job at blending these techniques and achieving a pleasing performance that is sensitive to the orignal baroque interpreation.

Teodor, I've just had a brief run through 941 and I really like it. As you say, a little more challenging. It's gone to the top of the queue. Thank you.

Lovely name, Eglantine.

Sorry, but this is probably incorrect. According to a Gould interview I listened to, Gould said that Bach actually had rather favourable things to say about the piano.

From Grove Music Online:

"[Bach] had also taken a critical interest in the pianos that Gottfried Silbermann was building during the 1730s, proposing alterations in the mechanism which Silbermann evidently adopted. At all events, Bach praised Silbermann’s later pianos and promoted their sale (a receipt for one sold to Poland, dated 6 May 1749, survives). On his visit to Potsdam in 1747 he played on a range of Silbermann pianos of the newer type which had been purchased by the Prussian court."

Well, even though this Grove music paragraph is a bit vague on details, it does, nonetheless, seem to support Gould's comment. Thanks for posting.

Thanks, Landorrano!

Small problem in BWV 999:

At the beginning of bar 23, my two editions each show a different note in the left hand: in the Verlag, it's E; in Classic Piano Collection ed. John Vallier, pub Cramer Music, it's D. The note in exactly the same position in surrounding bars (4 bars before, and 9 bars after) is D, and I don't think the E makes much sense... but on the other hand the Verlag would appear to be a 'more authoritative' score (whatever that means). Could this be a mis-print in the Verlag? (I haven't checked for any other differences.)

I've tried looking on the internet for other sources, but all the other ones I've found of 999 are the lute music, not keyboard.