Prelude and Fugue in C major, Well-Tempered Clavier Book I, by Johann Sebastian Bach

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Those who, like myself, don’t know where they’d be, if they’d be, if it weren’t for the greatest works of Bach, Beethoven, and Schubert, might be interested in my book, Cabeza and the Meaning of Wilderness: An Exploration of Nature, and Mind; click here for more. While perhaps only 10 to 20% of the book directly concerns music, all of it, in one way or another, delves deeply into that wilderness of Mind from which all great art arises. 

Also, I encourage anyone with even the slightest interest to visit my webpage at the above website, “Learning or Relearning the Piano as an Adult; A Spiritual Endeavor.” Since I myself only started at age 19, I feel I might be able to offer especial insight into the difficulties involved, and how they may be overcome. Also on that page I provide information on the stunning virtual piano I use for recording.

So. It was February 1968. I had just flunked out of college the previous spring. Because it all seemed so meaningless. I had been listening to such masterworks of despair as the Verdi Requiem and Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony . . . when a friend began introducing me to the greatest works of Bach, including The Well-Tempered Clavier. And I decided I would learn to play the piano. I started with the C major Prelude, then some of the Two-Part Inventions, then — while making a second stab at college, but ending up doing a ditto — the Fugue. I did manage to learn them and some other pieces, but then gave the piano up forever, since I was on track to become a fully enlightened Zen master and then, of course, would have no further need for music. However, after flunking out of the Rochester Zen Center . . . I took it up again. But again I gave it up as it seemed so impossible, as I would a score of times over the next couple decades, acquiring and dis-acquiring a half dozen pianos in the process. While I have been playing continuously for the last quarter century perhaps, I had been devoting myself almost exclusively to The Art of the Fugue, the Musical Offering, Beethoven’s Opus 109, and Schubert’s last Sonata in B-flat. But then a few months ago I was over at Amazon buying some rustproofing for my vehicle when Jeff Bezos had the thought I might be interested in Andras Schiff’s recording of The Well-Tempered Clavier. Well, I took a look, and wouldn’t you know . . . there were excerpts from all the Preludes and Fugues to listen to. And wouldn’t you know . . . the first two were the Prelude and Fugue in C major. And wouldn’t you know . . . I had to listen to them. And I thought, God! — I have to relearn this! Now! So I did. Schubert once made what I consider an especially endearing remark while listening to one of his own works performed: “You know, I never realized it was so beautiful.” That’s how I felt. I never realized they were so beautiful. So TRUTH–full. (Of course having a perfectly tuned and regulated, super-tweaked virtual Bösendorfer Imperial with the acoustical space of a large hall — as opposed to a crummy, out of tune old upright in a tiny student practice room — at my fingertips didn’t hurt.) So thanks, Jeff, no problem on this end with targeted advertising. Sorry I didn’t buy the Schiff.

The Prelude — I swear it must be the only utter supreme masterpiece in all of music that even a precocious 3-year-old wouldn’t take long to learn. Lang Lang probably learned it in 10 minutes — make that 5 minutes — when he started at the ripe old age of 22 months. But it is also a work one could spend one entire life seeing if one could really . . . get it right. Which, in a sense . . . I have done. Every note is on its own, alone, totally exposed. Or, rather, you, the performer, are totally exposed. All your faults, all the flaws and foibles of your being are revealed . . . for those who have ears to hear.

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The first recording I had was Glenn Gould’s and I just listened to it. Flippant is the only description I can think of. It’s like you’re trying to have a conversation of deepest significance with someone . . . and they keep cracking jokes. (Gould’s playing often — but not always; see below — strikes me in this manner.) And I understand the reason: fear. He is afraid of going into the awesome, awful depths. Then I tried my recording by Joerg Demus, which I prefer to all others I have heard (including Schiff and Hewitt). This was much better, but I still sensed a separation, again due to fear, from the heart of the music. When I played it myself for the first time in four decades it wasn’t too, too bad but in the last line—which requires a total letting go—all the tension in my right hand, arm, shoulder, abdomen, and ultimately mind was all too blatantly revealed. Once, after my wife and I had listened to the great Kyrie of the B Minor Mass, she remarked how haunting it was. I replied, “It’s designed to be haunting.” I truly believe that and that this Prelude was in part designed to reveal just how much work we need to do on ourselves: there before our very eyes and ears is T.S. Eliot’s, “Condition of complete simplicity” we all deep down long for — but . . . it “costs . . . not less than everything.”

But if you did decide . . . to let it in . . . and let it do its work. On your mind. On your soul. On your very Being. If, like Robert Schumann, you made a daily confession of your sins, i.e. your separation from the Reality which Eliot rightly says human kind cannot bear very much of . . . well . . . in time you might just find . . . there’d no Zen or Sufi master, no Christian saint or mystic . . . who had a thing on you. 
And then the Fugue (2:34): it’s exceptionally concentrated two pages neatly divide into four sections. The theme itself . . . is extraordinarily beautiful. “Like the sun, rising after endless night, burning off all clouds and mist, banishing the cold dark shadows, climbing ever higher and higher . . . this theme shines on all with the brilliance of its own perfection.” (Cabeza, Chapter 5, “The Last Sonata.”) With utter and complete simplicity it enters in the alto voice, starting on middle C, climbing up the first four notes of the C major scale, doing a graceful little pirouette, and then gently cascading down. Then the other three voices enter in orderly fashion following the rules of fugal writing, all intertwining in such an entrancing manner that Goethe wrote, upon hearing Bach performed for him, “. . . It was it as if the eternal harmony were conversing within itself, as it may have done in the bosom of God just before the Creation of the world. . . .” This is right on the money . . . except for the “as if.”

In the second section (3:05) things start getting a bit more serious and we have the first stretto (3:09): the overlapping of the theme in one voice with that of another. (Of note here is that the theme of the Dona Nobis Pacem of the B Minor Mass, with its supremely glorious yet terrifying glimpse of eternity, also climbs up the first four steps of the major scale, and overlaps with itself in stretto, suggesting this fugue was its precursor.) Now the harmonic modulations start having more bite to them, and Bach casts the rules to the wind. “Usually” in fugues the theme enters first on the tonic (in this case C), and then on the dominant (G), and so on. But in this segment, later on the theme enters on D. When I noticed this it made me a bit curious so I looked at all the entrances in the fugue. It would seem that just for fun Bach found a way to make the theme enter on every single note of the C major scale — making all rule makers cringe. But Bach never does anything just for fun. For example, in the last variation of the Goldberg Variations he combines the bass of the theme with a racy little folk ditty that includes the words, “With you! With you to the featherbed! With you! With you to the straw!” This is actually a double entendre with the purported raison d’être of the work: to put Count Kaiserling to sleep! (Presumably not with Bach.) But this becomes a triple entendre as that one single page of music is among the most moving, beautiful, truthful, meaningful pages in all music. But here in the C major Fugue, in addition to it being “just for fun,” I think it had something to do with displaying the all-pervasiveness — by entering on every tone — of the theme. It’s everywhere. Inescapable. Whether we like it . . . or not. Which we’ll get to shortly. But to continue, after the soprano cascades down with joyous abandon from high G (3:24), and immediately overlapped by a determined bass rising from low G— the second section ends with the theme entering on E and traversing up the E major scale, but with the added punch of a minor sixth. But we end harmoniously in A major . . . and all seems hunky-dory.

The third section (3:42) begins back at unthreatening commonplace middle C, and Bach has us all set up for . . . the kill. With utter intentness and absolute relentlessness the theme enters and reenters, over and over, over and over, in stretto with itself . . . giving me chills as I play . . . and making me want to weep. Upward the harmonic progressions lead us, into realms traversed by few, and soon we come to the sharp dissonance of a diminished chord (4:05) . . . followed by the even sharper dissonance . . . of the tritone (4:05.5). This chord, I discovered, permeates The Art of the Fugue at its most crucial points. I consider it the most UNPLEASANT sound. Take an octave and divide it into three equal segments of major thirds. It’s a horrible sound. Unbearable. Not only that but you feel totally stuck in it, like no resolution is possible. In the Middle Ages the Church — not wanting to believe that a loving God could possibly make such a cacophony — outlawed it! And called it — the devil’s chord! 

Here’s a real-life devil’s chord. Writes son Carl (C.P.E. Bach) in his father’s obituary:
“After thirteen years of blissful married life with his first wife [Maria Barbara], the misfortune overtook him, in the year 1720, upon his return to Cöthen from a journey with his Prince to Carlsbad, of finding her dead and buried, although he had left her hale and hearty on his departure. The news that she had been ill and died reached him only when he entered his own house.”

Cabeza, Chapter 30, “The Final Fugue II”: “One of Bach’s most remarkable works was composed at this time and many scholars consider it a memorial to Maria Barbara: the final movement of the Partita No. 2 for Solo Violin. The Chaconne . . . in D minor. Extraordinary is the only word possible. What Bach elicits from a single stringed instrument is unparalleled in music. You’d swear four instruments were performing. But what’s most remarkable is the depth of emotion: even my father, a normally reserved and emotionally restrained man, commented on how deeply it moved him, after I gave it to my parents for Christmas. There are three sections to the music. First: unmitigated grief slowly raised to the nth degree. Then an interlude: a memory of how joyous it had been. And finally: absolute and total despair. . . .”

The Well-Tempered Clavier is dated two years later, 1722. I have not the slightest doubt, from my knowledge of Bach’s life, and my feeling for this fugue, that this third section is showing us exactly what Bach went through, albeit in an extraordinarily concise manner, when he entered his house.

Of course we all have our own devil’s chords— though some would deny it, only to find on their deathbeds they are tolling loud and clear. For Beethoven, of course, there was his deafness. Deaf. A pianist! Deaf. A musician! Deaf. A composer! Deaf!!! And on top of that were his strong manic-depressive tendencies which made ordinary human relationships virtually impossible.

Cabeza, Chapter 11, “Me and the Moon”: “He obviously had a manic-depressive temperament. Maynard Solomon writes in Beethoven: ‘Signs of neurotic eccentricity—sudden rages, uncontrolled emotional states, an increasing obsession with money, feelings of persecution, ungrounded suspicions—persisted until Beethoven’s death, reinforcing Vienna’s belief that its greatest composer was a sublime madman.’ Though his name was known to all, he was even arrested, though promptly released, for looking like a tramp. (‘But I’m Ludwig van Beethoven.’ ‘Yes, and I’m Napoleon Bonaparte. Come along, now.’) If only he’d had Zoloft. Then he wouldn’t have wasted all that time writing all that useless music, and could have been an optimally functioning, productive member of society. Maybe then he’d have been less abnormal. And maybe counseling, or better yet a support group, would have helped him deal with his hearing loss. I mean, Vienna was a big, important city. There must have been, say, every Wednesday at 8 p.m., something for deaf composers of consummate and transcendent art. But no, he, who wrote in his Heiligenstadt Testament (written in his early thirties and found after his death in a drawer) that the dread affliction had brought him near suicide, just did not know how to cope. He really should have switched to architecture and created something useful and enduring. Instead, when English piano manufacturer Thomas Broadwood visited and inquired (either by shouting into Beethoven’s ear horn or writing in his notebook) how he liked the piano Broadwood had sent, and Beethoven said, Fine, very much, Broadwood made the mistake of peering inside. A tangle of broken strings greeted his eyes, the product of repeated and utterly vain attempts by the composer to hear a single sound.”

As for Schubert (Cabeza, Chapter 22, “Of Life and Death”): “At age nineteen he and his sweet-voiced sweetheart Teresa Grob were planning marriage: ‘I loved someone very dearly and she loved me . . . and hoped that I would marry her.’
    But his meager salary as schoolteacher would not support them. He applied for a position as music director at a small college but . . . was passed by.
    She married a master baker.”

That was devil’s chord number one. Next came devil’s chord number two: After falling in with the libertine Franz Schober, being sentenced to death by syphilis . . . at age 31.

But here’s the bottom line: Virtually all the most profound works, the works we most revere, of these true masters of the spirit, these undaunted explorers of the wilderness of Mind . . . were composed after their devil’s chord. Because of their devil’s chord. Beethoven: only after he had approached near total deafness, and proved himself an abject failure at human relationships, giving him no choice but to turn inward . . . were the last three sonatas, the late quartets, and the Ninth Symphony composed. Schubert: only when it was clear he had just months to live . . . did his last three sonatas and the great Quintet in C issue from his pen. And Bach: only after Maria Barbara’s death in 1720, were the B minor Mass, and especially after the sudden death, I speculate by suicide, of his possibly most talented yet deeply troubled son Bernhard in 1739 . . . the Musical Offering, and The Art of the Fugue brought into our world.

Johannes Brahms wrote that if he were to experience all the pain that was expressed in the Chaconne . . . it would drive him mad. But. At another time his friend violinist Joseph Joachim performed for him the Bach Sonata No. 2 for violin, very similar in spirit. Brahms then sat down to the piano and began to play one of his own works. But before getting past a few bars he crashed his fists in fury into the keyboard, crying out that compared with Bach, his own works were so banal he could not bear to play them. (His Trio No. 1 in B major is not banal.)

It often seems to me that 99.9% of modern “culture” is dedicated to keeping us from seeing, from hearing, the devil’s chords within ourselves. To use T.S. Eliot’s words, we are “distracted from distraction by distraction” . . . to the nth degree. Still, we — some of us at least — treasure beyond all else the masterworks of those few . . . who, by force of circumstance or inner constitution or who knows, did not deny those seemingly unbearable chords within. Somehow we know . . . like Brahms . . . what we are missing.

Which brings us to the final section (4:12). In Cabeza I discuss the experience of someone I call The Woman of the Lightning, whom I discovered in William James classic, The Varieties of Religious Experience. She writes, “I wondered if I was in a prison being tortured, and why I remember having heard it said that people ‘learned through suffering,’ and in view of what I was seeing, the inadequacy of the saying struck me so much that I said, aloud, ‘to suffer is to learn.’ ” And later the understanding came to her that “Knowledge and Love are One, and the measure is suffering.” This is what the first part of the last section shows us, especially as the theme rises up most poignantly in the alto from B (4:24), and this understanding suffuses all Bach’s greatest works as well as those of Beethoven and Schubert.

And what is the root cause of that suffering, those devil’s chords? Albert Einstein, in a letter written only a few months before his own death, wrote, “A human being is part of the Whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us. . . . Our task must be to free ourselves . . .” This prison . . . the human condition . . . the Zen koan of our very own lives that it’s our “job” to figure out or else . . . is the devil’s chord. But if we deny we are in prison, how can we ever find freedom from it? Thus the necessity of feeling acutely our imprisonment, our suffering.

Then, in the final lines (4:36) Bach shows how he lets go of the entire experience (none of the Zen “smell of enlightenment” here) so that only the “condition of complete simplicity” remains, for which he has paid — and ever so gently suggests to us we might do the same — the always utterly nonnegotiable price of . . . not less than everything.

Now one might be tempted to think Bach was over the hump. He had seemingly happily remarried Anne Magdalena (but for some reason she was not adequately provided for after his death and was given a pauper’s burial). But still to come is the deep dark desperate despair of the sixth partita (played incomparably by Glenn Gould who therefore must have known such despair himself). Still to come is the sudden death at age 22 of son Bernhard. And still to come is his final masterpiece— called “infinitely moving, with a pathos and grandeur given to no other work,” by Charles Rosen—The Art of the Fugue, left unfinished intentionally I speculate, as none of us humans, it would seem, are ever allowed to be entirely over the hump.

So . . . if you tried the Prelude, and like me played a few of the Two- and Three-Part Inventions (the two-part in C major is a good place to start; the three-part C minor is especially beautiful), perhaps the deeply soulful (but easy) Sarabande from the third partita . . . and then, like me, maybe you couldn’t resist trying . . . the Fugue . . . well . . . of course it would be impossible. How can one hand play two— sometimes three! — melody lines at once, you would think. How can one brain play four melody lines at once? And it would be impossible . . . the first day. Maybe a tiny bit less the second — assuming you looked at my website page and tried some of the exercises there, targeting them, as I show, to the work. And the third day . . . may be a teeny tiny, eenie-weenysie bit less. And maybe in the process your brain would grow a few more — a lot more — neurons to deal with the challenge. And in time you might just make it through the entire piece with only a few mistakes. And then you might understand for yourself what Jeremy Denk has suggested in a 2012 article in The New Republic: That this might just be . . . the most important thing . . . the most meaningful thing . . . you’ve ever done.