Ex. 13-1: Fugue

No. 8 from Book II of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, compiled around 1739–1742, when Bach was in his fifties and music director in Leipzig. Both the prelude and the fugue are written in D-sharp minor, a key of six sharps. Six sharps is a remote key, and the whole point of the Well-Tempered Clavier is that a good tuning lets even keys this far out sound in tune. Book I also has a prelude and fugue in this key, and it is in this app. (Ex. 12-1: Fugue (edited fragment) by Johann Sebastian Bach)

By this time, musical fashion had turned away from Bach's dense counterpoint toward a simpler, lighter style. A young critic, Johann Adolf Scheibe, had even attacked Bach's music in print as overworked and confusing. Bach answered in his own way — by writing a whole second book of preludes and fugues, again through all 24 keys.

D-sharp minor came to be thought of as a dark, troubled key. The writer Christian Schubart said that if ghosts could speak, they would speak in this key — though he wrote that decades after Bach's time.

The fugue is in four voices. Its theme later returns turned upside down, and Bach saves the moment when the theme and its mirror image first sound together for the very end.

The Well-Tempered Clavier was never printed in Bach's lifetime; it passed from hand to hand in copies. Mozart studied it in Vienna, and Beethoven is said to have played the whole set by about the age of eleven.

From the album Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II by Ramin Bahrami (2016)
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