The Well-Tempered Clavier Book I

My recent years of Bach immersion and subsequent formulation of my own Bach method were inspired and informed by John Eliot Gardiner’s Music In The Castle Of Heaven, his chronicle of studying and touring Bach’s cantatas and masses, and Deutsche Gramophon’s Bach300 collection, a comprehensive archive of historically informed performances by Nikolaus Harnoncourt and others. To my own surprise, I came to realize Bach had composed the majority of his music for the most expressive of instruments, the human voice. Recognizing the centrality of the lyric impulse in Bach’s music it became clear to me that — far from the largely binary, legato/staccato keyboard tradition — there could well be as many articulations in performing Bach’s keyboard music as there are consonants in any sung language; as many ways of connecting or distinguishing notes as there are ways of breathing or eliding between syllables, words, and phrases. Even with the paucity of notated indication in Bach’s keyboard scores, I sought to reexamine them with an eye to creating an interpretive basis wherein the range of possibility inherent in those markings he left us could engender a freer, more richly variegated range of expressive possibility.

As Bach’s compositional brilliance never ceases to amaze, my own approach was to be predicated instead upon the relationship between voices within that boundless universe of invention, not so much about the notes but the space between them.

Bach intended The Well-Tempered Clavier as a guide toward cultivating the clearest expression of counterpoint on the keyboard. Although there is anecdotal evidence to suggest that Bach’s favorite keyboard of his time was the dynamically pliant if only faintly audible clavichord, our present day tradition tends toward implicit homage to the dynamically-inflexible harpsichord. Without the ability to contrast or give profile to voices by dynamic contrast, how can we give prominence to one voice over another? In my working through all the Fugues on harpsichord I discovered many means of contrapuntal distinction whichwere profoundly impactful on my interpretation of Bach’s music and indeed my playing of all repertoire.

Cultivating differentiation of counterpoint and texture is the immediate challenge in the Prelude I in C Major. Pre-Bach preludes would often be notated as whole note chords whose figuration was left to be improvised by the performer. Bach specifies this Prelude’s arpeggiated pattern as a chord whose last triplet repeats, suggesting an invitation to variation. Why not treat those notes as an echo? As each measure consists of an exact repetition of the first half, why not distinguish the feeling of downbeat in the measure’s first half from a clearly discernible upbeat feeling in the second? Without the ability to make the repetition softer on the dynamically-inflexible harpsichord, one can still create the illusion of echo by slowing and shortening its last three notes, creating the feeling of sonic distance in echoed reply. The second half of the measure could be played in the opposite manner; starting the right hand with shorter notes, making the repetition more compressed in time and legato in touch; a true upbeat to the next measure. Our sense of sonic perspective and distance is created by our newly expanded sense of articulative possibility.

Articulation, more truly described as duration, is the notational parameter offering the widest possible range of execution. When we play a note on the piano, we take the composer’s rhythmic designation for its length as the rule; a quarter note is held for its duration up to a notated rest or next note. But what of a quarter-note orchestrated for pizzicato cello? The plucked note would hardly ring past the length of an eighth note. Best to presume the occurrence of the notes as indicative of their place in time on the score’s continuum and allow a range of possibility as to true length, inviting other considerations, like giving more prominence to one voice over another, to inform our performance.

In the prevailing absence of notated articulation in Bach’s keyboard music, there’s a traditional tendency to play one voice either all legato or all staccato. But in Bach’s more fully-notated scores for another of his mastered instruments, the violin, we see great sweeping slurs showing his intention they be played in one bow, one breath; his notated implication of four 16ths as two slurred together and two separate. With such printed indications rare in his keyboard music, it is likely that Bach left those articulative decisions up to the informed taste of the player rather than meant as an abdication of decisive responsibility.

Over-holding is an effective way to express slurs in Bach’s keyboard music. In Baroque violin practice, a two-note slur suggests an inception though not an accent, followed by a distinct decay and release of the slur’s end; a sigh, a perceptible weakening. On the piano, we tend to see a slur as a sign to play all notes within it smoothly, with no pliable sense of such a sigh.

Masking the attack of subsequent notes, as in the four-note slurs of Prelude XI in F Major, Book II, we create such a sigh with each four-note slur, as well as a halo of accumulated resonance, presaging the piano’s damper pedal.

Even in textures of dogged consistency, one finds a way to shift focus and perspective, maintaining vibrant interest even in a consistent texture’s colloquy.

In the largely mirrored 16th note texture between right and left hands in Prelude II in c minor, one differentiates between the hands by making the first quarter 16ths of the right hand longer than those of the left, making the longer notes the last voice sounding in the listener’s ear, then alternating on the second quarter so that the left hand 16ths are longer and more prominent. The last voice sounding impinges on the ear immediately at an instinctual level.

As in the C Major Prelude, the two halves of each measure are identical, so a similar articulative contrast between halves suggests itself again as an attractive manner of contrapuntal distinction. In the more texturally varied colloquy of the fugues, this shifting of focus between voices is continually enlivened by juxtaposing pairs of longer notes in one voice against shorter notes in the other.

Intonation is another parameter in which the space between notes is essential. A central precept of Russian piano pedagogy, intonation refers not to tuning or temperament, but to the intoning of intervals: a half step requires the intimate closeness of a violinist squeezing a leading tone, a whole step a more forthright, stately progression. With the piano’s capacity for dynamic differentiation, we can make intonational adjustments on an atomic level: one note can always be either louder or softer than the one that follows. Each subsequent broadening of space between intervals — thirds, fourths, fifths, etc. — requires a comparably more accommodative expansion of time as well as dynamic recognition of its lyric contour.

In contrapuntal textures, there is an implicit need for recognition of the space between voices. Though nothing could be easier than alternating hands in notated lockstep, such execution would not give proper dramatic and narrative distinction to a true interaction of voices. Bach often makes specific the transfer between hands, as in the guitar-like texture of Prelude XXI in Bb Major: the inherent space between notated exchange of hands is like the space between cued orchestra sections, and requires our omnipresent recognition of the space and time between.

The ineffable dark matter between notes becomes quintessentially important when we find ourselves in moments of accelerated harmonic motion. We must expand by ritenuto, pulling back on tempo’s reins to accommodate and clarify a denser, more complex harmonic flow. A more specifically musical term for this type of needful flexibility is agogic: the accentuation of notes by slightly extending or compressing their duration outside their presupposed rhythmic value; accentuation not by force, but by expanding or compressing the flow of time. By treating as elastic the space and time between notes, we create a greater sense of mass and import in expansion. By quickening a run of notes, compressing their relative space, a lighter texture and impetuosity is communicated. Absent dynamic shading on the harpsichord, agogic is one of the most prevalent and infinitely variable of expressive modes.

Even within one apparent voice we can find reason for differentiation. The Prelude III in C# Major was the first to suggest to me the idea of Voices within Voices: that the right hand figure could conceivably be divided into the melodic “upper voice” and its more parenthetical harmonically supportive and unchanging “low voice.”

The Well-Tempered Clavier is not merely a catalog of pieces representing all the major and minor keys, it is dramatically organized as a set — with complete performance in mind — into groups of four Preludes and Fugues, every fourth in one of the complex minor keys. There is as well throughout the 48 an abundance of embedded Christian imagery. The Fugue IV in c# minor is a work of singular gravitas; a triple fugue with each of its three subjects designated as an illustrative aspect of the Crucifixion.

Bach describes the first subject as “Ave Verum Corpus” (Christ on the Cross), and is itself a chiastic figure in that its four notes describe a cross. If one draws a line between the first and third notes, it forms a cross with a line connecting the second and fourth. Bach would often use the letters of his own name as a chiastic motive: B (B flat)-A-C-H (B natural).

The c# minor’s chiastic subject appears in half and whole notes. Its second subject, appearing last, is quickened into quarter notes. “Cujus Latus Perforatus” (Nails & the Spear) is hammer-stroke fateful in Beethovenian style.

The third subject is further quickened into eighth notes, and Bach’s Latin appellation, “Unda Fluxit Sanguine” (Streams of Healing, or in other words, Tears) proved revelatory for me applied to the wider repertoire. In a Beethoven Sonata, for example, we feel the doubling of rhythmic currency as heightened tension and excitement. In this Fugue, however, the quickened rhythmic current instead denotes mournful tears, a raised level of expressivity and empathy, not excitement. “Twice as fast” is now instead “expressivity squared.”

As overwhelmed as we are by Bach’s wealth of invention and compositional imagination, my interpretation of The Well-Tempered Clavier is in the end primarily concerned with the space between the notes, the relationships among voices. I have come to think of this in terms of Ma.

Ma (間) is a Japanese term that encapsulates a profound aesthetic of space and time. Translating as “the space between,” it emphasizes the importance of empty space — the pause — between elements conveying and accentuating meaning, allowing for reflection and greater depth of feeling. Ma is the silence, the polar magnetism determining the gravitational pull and repulse between notes. It is the pause at the deepest point of a Japanese bow, the pregnant void in an ikebana floral arrangement. Ma makes room for enhanced understanding. A universal concept, Ma applies to every aspect of aesthetics and life, and is intrinsically applicable to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. It is this connective, magical dark matter — the Ma — that affords the boundless wonder of unseen implication and infinite possibility and creates the fullest, most comprehensive and revelatory understanding of Bach’s genius.

— Christopher O’Riley