Prelude & Fugue No. 11 in F Major

Bach puts all his technical difficulties into one basket—the Prelude. If he was teaching us the piece to perform, he would probably insist that before tackling it we start with his two-part Invention in A Major, which prepares the fingers for the Prelude’s challenge of sustaining long trills in one hand while dealing with cascades of fast notes in the other—and doing both evenly. As if this wasn’t enough, there’s also a lesson in phraseology, as Bach moves whimsically between four-beat, two-beat and one-beat patterns. The Fugue offers fewer challenges—perhaps the simplest of all 24 in Book 1 of the Well-Tempered Clavier—though none of his fugues is exactly easy. Unlike Bach’s ambitious fugal themes based on dramatic or angular ideas, the F Major Fugue is delightfully tuneful and dance-like, reminiscent of the long-breathed passepieds which he also used in the English Suite No. 5 and his Orchestral Suite in C major. About J.S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier Book I If we had to choose the most influential of Bach’s works in the centuries since his death, the biggest votes would probably go to the St Matthew Passion and The Well-Tempered Clavier. The epithet “well-tempered” refers to “equal temperament”—a new method of tuning keyboard instruments, which made a wide range of keys available. Bach showed off these possibilities in two books of preludes and fugues in all 24 major and minor keys, which is why the collection is sometimes known as the “48”. Partly drawing on earlier works, Bach completed Book 1 around 1722 and Book 2 20 years later, constantly revising both. He intended the pieces to be useful to players of all types of keyboard instrument.