User:Noyamama/Prelude and Fugue in F minor, BWV 857

the Well-Tempered Clavier I The Prelude and Fugue in F minor (BWV 857) is the twelfth pair of preludes and fugues from the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier by Johann Sebastian Bach, compiled around 1722.

The prelude is imbued with a touching melancholy. The four-part fugue is pathetic, unusually long, and one of the most strongly thought out in the collection.



Prelude
The prelude, noted, contains 22 measures.

The first half of the first notebook of the Well-Tempered Clavier concludes with an imposing pair. Bach obviously attached a lot of value to this prelude, whose serious tone is close to the cantata BWV 12 “Weep, moan, suffer, renounce”.

It is one of the most touching preludes, of a "gray melancholy", made up of a very free polyphonic of the broken chords, in often virtual voice and without silences, a masterpiece that some have seen intended for the organ due to the abundance of slurs and the coda pedal. It is not written in four strict voices, but the held quarter notes represent the additional voice. The theme reappears in the tonic key, on a dominant pedal just before the coda.

Fugue
The four-part fugue, notated, 58 measures long, is one of the most strongly thought out in the collection and unusually long.

The subject is almost a figured chorale theme, it includes ten chromatic notes in quarter notes, over an octave and three measures and completes the path from dominant to tonic. With the response that adds F-sharp and E-flat, all notes in the chromatic scale are heard. It is a very unusual subject and only comparable with that of the 24th fugue.

The ornamentation of the penultimate note is only interpretative conjecture, because no sign of ornamentation or trill (as in the B minor fugue), is authentic and in some cases impossible to achieve, although a short trill can emphasize the presence of the subject in an intermediate voice (for example bar 36).

Almost directly, the two counter-subjects follow which are systematically combined with the subject in a regular inversion. The first (measures 4) opposes its four incises to the subject and travels an octave. This figure called “sighs” then appears in almost every measure of the work. The octave jump to the bass is only present in the exposure, but is not maintained afterwards.

The second, stated for the first time at the end of measure 7, reinforces the first. The three motifs combined form a whole full of dissonance and severity. Although the design is a invertable counterpoint, not all possible combinations of the subject and its countersubjects are used. The bridges are also freely permutable, the first two (measures 10–13 and 16–19) providing the material for the others (five), with the exception of measures 37 to 40, inspired by the material of the first counter-subject.

The exposition presents the subject successively to the tenor, alto, bass (with the two counter-subjects henceforth except measure 40) and after three measures of a harmonic march, to the soprano to whom Bach boldly entrusts the subject (measure 13) and not the expected answer. The following entries are made two by two steps more: in tenor, in three voices (measures 19), bass (measure 27); in alto in A-flat major (measure 34), tenor without countersubjects (measure 40); in soprano in E-flat major, three voices (measure 47) and in bass (measure 53). The contours of the voices are confused on the two staves, due to the numerous crossings of voices of the different motifs.

Note that the bass interrupts twice for long bars (19–27 and 47–53) before reappearing as the subject. Towards the end of the second development (bars 27–46), the tenor enters alone, without the two countersubjects (bar 40).

This fugue presents a lack of clear division between exposition and episodes. It consists of individual entries of the subject joined by bridges of a few measures, but poorly developed and never articulated as separate passages.

Interspersed between each return of the subject, the bridges/diversions in steps (measures 22–25; 31–33; 50–52) bring relaxation in a perfectly diatonic treatment. It is therefore the support of opposition and contrast, with the chromatic and tense subject, forming “two principles”. The form of this fugue thus evokes the rondo. To preserve the register in which the subject is presented, these entertainments are in three voices, except the last (bars 43–47). But in this entertainment the soprano only uses his lowest register, which gives the impression of another voice when the subject returns.

The rhythmic pattern in dactyls is borrowed from the first bridge between the subject and the first counter-subject. This rhythm, widely used in cantatas, is called by Albert Schweitzer "the motif of joy", but here it is full of serenity and imbued with peace of mind.

Relation between Prelude and Fugue
The prelude “leaves a presentiment in the shadows” of the subject in very elongated notes (coda, bars 16–20).