Bach: WTC I, Prelude and Fugue in E flat major

In the Prelude and Fugue in E flat, Bach explores other fresh ideas. For example, the prelude is actually more rigorously contrapuntal than the fugue! We tend to think of Baroque preludes as usually being brief, fantasia-like and improvisatory. And often they are. But Bach sometimes makes rather more of them. In this prelude, for example, Bach bases the opening section on the simplest of motifs:

Not only "bases," that is virtually the only thematic material! Then there is a two-measure virtuoso flourish leading to a new section in quarters and half-notes that unfolds a simple theme, but in close imitation at the half-note:

Click to enlarge

In this example you can see the second measure of the flourish and the beginning of the contrapuntal section. It begins with a canon in four voices: first the tenor, then the bass a half note later, then the alto and finally the soprano. This turns into free counterpoint, but bit by bit, the sixteenth notes return until, by measure 26, the first, simple, motif returns and is combined with the canonic idea. This is elaborated and developed over three pages with the first motif and the canonic theme weaving in and out.

The fugue is rather more conventional with one of Bach's most catchy subjects. But it is the countersubject, a jaunty little arpeggio figure, that he chooses to develop in the episodes. The subject isn't even stated that often, just now and then as if as a reminder. Instead, Bach seems to focus all his attention on the countersubject right through to the end with a rather jazzy chromatic descent from E flat through D flat, C, C flat to B flat.

Here is András Schiff from his tour-de-force performance of the whole Well-Tempered Clavier from the BBC Proms: