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Good afternoon. We ended the previous lecture with me playing Bach's Prelude in C major from the first volume of The Well-Tempered Clavier. I approached it a little and started talking about it.
In-depth analysis of Bach's Prelude in C major, BWV 846, exploring its structure, symbolism, and connection to the Well-Tempered Clavier.
Key Takeaways
- Bach's Prelude in C major is a highly symbolic and structurally sophisticated work integrating divine and human numerical symbolism.
- The prelude and fugue form a dramatic and formal unity, representing preparation and fulfillment respectively.
- Bach intuitively applied the golden ratio to shape the musical and harmonic climax of the prelude.
- Visual symbolism (Augenmusik) plays a significant role in Bach's compositions, linking music to spiritual and artistic meanings.
- Understanding Bach's work requires appreciating both its musical and symbolic dimensions, bridging auditory and visual art forms.
What the video covers
- The lecture focuses on Bach's Prelude in C major from The Well-Tempered Clavier, BWV 846, analyzing its 35 measures and unique musical qualities.
- Discussion of the symbolic significance of numbers in Bach's work, especially the divine number seven and the human number five.
- The prelude is linked to the biblical story of the Archangel Gabriel's visit to the Virgin Mary, symbolizing spiritual themes.
- Exploration of the prelude and fugue as a microcycle, with the prelude representing external preparation and the fugue internal fulfillment.
- Bach's intuitive use of the golden ratio within the prelude is highlighted, particularly around bars 21-22 as a structural and harmonic climax.
- Identification of Bach's musical monogram 'BACH' encoded in the theme, forming a cross shape, an example of Augenmusik (eye music).
- Analysis of harmonic shifts, especially the unique use of seconds in bar 23, which draws attention as a golden ratio point.
- The lecture emphasizes the artistic principles of beginnings, ends, and the golden section as key structural points in music and art.
- Discussion on the interplay between symbolic visual elements in music scores and their auditory experience.
- Reflection on the broader cycles in Bach's work, including the first and second volumes of The Well-Tempered Clavier as a megacycle.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Prelude Overview
- 04:59Biblical Symbolism and Archangel Gabriel
- 07:34Golden Ratio in Bach's Prelude
- 10:34Harmonic Analysis and Bar 23 Significance
- 13:15Artistic Principles: Beginnings, Ends, and Culmination
- 15:53Musical Monogram and Augenmusik
- 19:04Structural Cycles in Bach's Work
- 20:57Summary and Reflections on Bach's Music
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
And it's such a great work—the prelude, the fugue, and the prelude itself—that, of course, we'll dwell on it in more detail, maybe even dedicate the entire lecture to it. We won't make any predictions. And at the beginning of the lecture, I'll simply
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play this prelude without the fugue for now. One more time. It was Bach's prelude from the first volume of The Well-Tempered Clavier in C major. It has 35 measures; we'll now analyze this completely unique, great, holy, blessed, beautiful, brilliant,
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incomprehensible work. Then we'll add the fugue. 35. Of course, numbers are important here. Numbers are very important to Bach in general. Perhaps it's 7 plus 7 multiplied by 5. Seven is a divine number, five is a human number.
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As I already said, traditionally, this music is associated with the Archangel Gabriel's visit to the Virgin Mary. You can read the Gospel of Luke and remember. In the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a
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city of Galilee named Nazareth. He was betrothed to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph, a widow of the house of David; the Virgin's name was Mary.
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The angel came to her and said, "Hail, full of grace! The Lord is with you; blessed are you among women." When she saw him, she was troubled by his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. And the angel said to her,
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"Fear not, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God
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will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and his kingdom will have no end. Then Mary said to the angel, 'How can this be, since I know no man?' The angel answered and said to
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her, 'The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore also the holy child to be born will be called the Son of God. Behold, your relative Elizabeth, who was called barren, has
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also conceived a son in her old age, and this is the sixth month with her; for with God nothing will be impossible.' Then Mary said, 'Behold the handmaid of the Lord: be it to me according to your word.' And the angel departed from
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her. Let us stop here for now. The prelude is most likely those very same archangel wings, and their conversation is already a fugue. The thought itself, expressed by both the Archangel Gabriel and the Mother of God's responses. As
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is usually the case in a prelude and fugue. The prelude is external, the fugue is internal. The prelude is the preparation, the fugue is the fulfillment. The prelude is the setting. The fugue is the action itself. Such
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is the dramatic, formal connection between these two parts of this two-part, well, that's what they call a microcycle. The microcycle is the fugue prelude, one of the two. And the macrocycle, accordingly, is all 24 fugue preludes, called the first volume
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of the piano score, which is well rendered in this way. And I also have an idea that there is a megacycle, the first and second volumes are also like a large two-part cycle, but that's my idea. So there you have it. And for now,
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let's look at the prelude. It is unique in many ways. Here is the number 35, a combination of seven and five. 7 times 5 is the divine perfect number seven and the human number five. Five fingers, five senses. But, well, and,
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accordingly, Bach, as we already know, had an absolutely incredible feeling, a sense, apparently intuitively, of the golden ratio point. That is, here it falls approximately at the twenty-first, twenty-second bars. No, there is no need to calculate precisely, but Bach
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had such a precise feeling that he apparently did not even calculate, did not multiply the number of bars by 0.62. And here, in this place, a musician can always try to count this way and see what is in this place, what the
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composer has used at the culminating point, the highest note, the most complex harmony, the most unusual melodic structure. And here we see the theme BX. Here is B. I will play half a bar. A, C and X. Bach's monogram is
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hidden. BACH, his name. And at the same time, it's a cross. I was saying that at that time, short themes like these had some kind of visual designation. If we connect a straight line, write these four notes on the
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staff, and connect the first and fourth notes and the second and third notes with two straight lines, we get a cross. This technique, so to speak, is called Augen Musik in German. Eye music. Music whose symbolic meaning is only
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clear when looking at the score. There. And to the ear, of course, it's unclear why it's a cross. Everything flows so smoothly. There. And this symbolic meaning, something that later disappeared from music, these abstract, in our opinion, things. In the 18th and
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19th centuries, especially in the 19th century, they almost disappeared, but in the 20th century, they began to appear again. Composers began to turn to this, to these eras, and explore these things. That's why they are very important to us now. And here is the
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twenty-third bar. We see here, uh, a very unusual measure, because there were harmonies everywhere. This is the first measure, the first half-measure.
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Solid thirds, yes, nowhere was there any movement by seconds. And here is the only twenty-third, where Bach shifts, shifts these thirds. First they are regular, then minor. Well, that is, minor and major, then two minor. But in the twenty-third, seconds appear. I
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remember when I was learning this prelude at the conservatory, and I brought it to Lev Nikolaevich Nava. He said, smiled slyly at me and said: "But if we continue logically like this, then look, look, there were two minor
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thirds, then two seconds, and then you need to do this one note at a time." Yes, the music is destroyed, but, in general, there is logic. So the question arises: why did Bach leave this measure alone? Precisely because
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this point is the golden ratio; it must draw attention to itself somehow, because there will be nothing further than this, except for the very last one. This conclusion of this figuration, the last bar, already reminds us of the
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golden section point and introduces us to the fugue, which will begin with these same three notes. Just like one of the fundamental principles of art, there are three main points in any work of art: the beginning, the end, and the
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golden section point, the culmination. And so, for example, when Karajan rehearsed operas, people present at the rehearsals recalled, he rehearsed the first 15 minutes for an hour, and the finale for the last 15 minutes, also an hour. Well, about 15 minutes, about an
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hour, naturally. And then he ran through the entire opera, because everyone already, so to speak, knew how it should be in the middle, and they themselves had done it. The beginning and the end. Remember the compensation block? But you, artist, firmly believe
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in beginnings and ends. You know where hell and heaven guard us. You are given the ability to measure everything you see with a dispassionate measure. Let your gaze be firm and clear. Erase the random features, and you will see that
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the world is beautiful. Beginnings and ends, and the feeling of a beautiful world. It is all here. And look, let's turn to the beginning now. The first bars. You don't even have to take the second harmony. Let's look at the first
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harmony. It consists of five notes. 1 2 3 4 5 The human number five. It is divided into two parts. The first part is played by the left hand—this is C and E. And they are written so that C
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is one lower voice, and E is already the middle voice. This is not one line that goes continuously upward. And it turns out that C is one voice, E is the second voice, and this, the fact that the right hand pla
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voice. It turns out the number three. Trinity, God, one God in three persons, who is now about to be incarnated. And it is clear that the bass is God the Father. The bass is always God the Father. Then it will be an octave at
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the end. In the third, in the thirty-second measure, it will become an octave. And the octave for us, especially in the bass, is also a symbol of God the Father, a symbol of some kind of generality, community, a
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symbol of greatness. The middle voice is probably God the Son, a third, the most human, moving part, uh, of a triad . And the top is the Holy Spirit, who soars and who is the life-giving spirit . He will give life. And it,
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accordingly, also consists of three notes. Now even if we look at the intervals themselves, a major third, then a minor third, then a minor, then a fourth, culminating in the widest interval of these three. And the ending is again a large line, as if from a
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certain point slightly downwards, narrower, then wider at the culmination and back again. A large thea. This line running, so to speak, is like the theme of the cross again. Look what happens next. Well, here, first of all, there
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are eight notes. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 culmination. The fifth note. And this is the conclusion. Again, the golden ratio. 2 and 3 is also, by the way, the golden ratio. 2 and 3. What does he do
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next? Second bar. The range expands slightly for a tiny second. It was like this, and now it is like this. Third bar. One and a half octaves, the widest range. And again narrowing, again expansion and narrowing, again the
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third bar is the culmination. This principle is everywhere, everywhere. And then in the fifth bar, suddenly, such an incredibly important event occurred. The upper voice jumped up a fourth. And we heard this range of an octave and a sixth. And then it went on
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. You see, the fifth fingers, the upper voices of these chords gradually began to be perceived by us as a melody. And there is an example of a Bach manuscript in which this prelude is written out in chords. I already said
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that such a tradition used to exist. They simply wrote the keys in a column and put the word" arpiggiata. "That's how this prelude was written down in some rough draft. It's in Bach's manuscripts that remain to us. And it
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wasn't until 1922 that some German musicologist realized that this melody, which sounds in the upper voice, is already gradually preparing the theme of the fugue. These fourths. And even if we further play the theme of the fugue with the harmonies of the prelude
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, it turns out that it's basically a coincidence. And here's another secret. The piano score is conveyed so well.
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There's always a hint in the prelude, an embryo, uh, and sometimes just, so to speak, an almost unformed, but very clearly and distinctly laid out theme of the fugue. And it's absolutely necessary to find it. It's absolutely necessary to know that it's there,
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because it's like a certain possibility , like a certain realization. And here I want to add to my statement at the beginning of the lecture about the prelude being the external fugue. The prelude is the preparation, the fugue
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is the fulfillment. The prelude is external. The fugue is internal. Uh, the prelude, well, what I said is the traditional view. It seems to me, perhaps, my personal opinion, that the prelude is our life, and the fugue is
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our life after death. The prelude is what is now and what we prepare on earth, what happens before the prelude.
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And only on this earth do we learn to live. We are like composers who write a protitarium for their life on Earth.
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And how it sounds, this score, we will find out when the orchestra performs it . The problem of composers: does he hear the orchestra in his ears? And when we die, that's when this procedure begins to sound. And how is it? And
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nothing can be changed. Kompot might say," Well, please, there are oboes, play an octave with the bassoons. "I like that better. But in real life, no.
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It turns out that a fugue is something that will happen after death. And there's already a lot of voice there.
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In the prelude, as a rule, Bach doesn't use polyphony. Of course, it happens often, but we live in a simultaneous space. Music, art, is temporary. And if we consider time as space, then it is one-dimensional, so to speak,
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time-space. There is also multidimensionality in that world. We can simultaneously be, it seems, both here and there, both in the past and in the future. How completely incomprehensible it is. And so, to learn to play polyphony, we must try
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here today to be in two spaces at once. Because when we play a melody, we are in this space of the melody. We experience a movement toward F. And when another melody plays at the same time, we must experience it just as
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intensely and immerse ourselves in it. But we're alone, we can't play two melodies at once. That's where the problem arises. And then this funny story comes to mind about the greatest pianist, and performer of Bach's music, Glen Gould. As everyone knows, there
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was an interview with him in a newspaper or some magazine by a journalist. As is well known, Glen Gould went to bed very late in the morning, and he even started meeting with this journalist at three or four
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o'clock. And when the journalist came to Gould, he saw something very strange . Gould was sitting at the table, writing something, sometimes the phone rang, he answered something, simultaneously moving his hand across the paper, pen across the paper, and
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speaking. And there were eight televisions right there, and they were all on different channels. This was the seventies, so they were all turned up loud, at a loud level. In short, there was some kind of strange noise. And he
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said:" Please, ask me. "He asked something, and he answered. Then he talked about something, wrote something , and watched TV. The director, not a journalist, could not stand it and said :" Excuse me, Mr. Gul, if it is
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inconvenient for you now, set another time, and I will come. "No, no, no, I'm sorry, I didn't warn you. This is my way of communicating. Ask questions, I can do several things at once. The journalist was amazed and asked:" Okay,
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first question: "Why do you need eight TVs?" Gul said: "You know, I watch them ." Then he asked: "And while you were talking on the phone, he was watching some detective story on this TV. What happened here on the seventh TV?""And
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Gul told him everything. 'This one killed so-and-so,' and all that." The director was amazed, the journalist was amazed and said: "Now I understand why you have such polyphonic thinking in music. Why do you play Bach's polyphonic fugue as if it were a
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completely monophonic work? And all your voices live their own lives. This is what Yudina had. But Gould did it in such a way that it's absolutely incredible how he achieved it at all.
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And so they say that these are those who were there and returned from there.
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In general, this is what they hint at, although it is very difficult to explain in words. This is such a polyphony. It is about the combination of prelude and fugue. And this is how Bach polyphonizes this homophonic texture to the extreme. This is how the
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lower voice, this is the middle voice, and this is the upper one. This is also amazing. Here, in this four-voice, four-bar beginning, there is also the theme of the cross. The first chord is the tonic do major. Next comes the
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subdominant function. This m is like the second second degree of the mm uh second chord. These are the basics of harmony. But the point is that this is the subdominant, and the sub, uh, this lower uh dominant is the dominant note.
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The tonic is the main note in the key. The dominant isn't the main one, but it's dominant, meaning it's second in importance, and the subdominant's lower , second in importance, meaning it's third in importance. And so this lower,
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basic, so to speak, subdominant for C is F. The second, second, is the subdominant. In this case, it's R, but it's a subdominant function. The third harmony is the dominant, G, and the fourth, C, is at the tonic level, then
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down, then up, then back to the tonic. And this is how the beginning of Bach's preludes is often constructed, and the second prelude is subdominant, the dominant is tonic, too. We'll see later how the first and second also form a
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kind of cycle. Here, too, there are many such crosses, as it were, both in the first harmony and in the fourth measure. And further in this emerging theme is the theme of soloriorising.
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Here it is. This intonation is also key . I talked about it in the last lecture in connection with Biber. This is the theme of his posakalya for solo violin, which includes these three notes. Let me repeat a little: perhaps at the end
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of the twenty-fourth and final fugue of the Siminor, Bach inserts the word" fino "(final) and three letters with a DG. The abbreviation is an abbreviation for the soliloquy of Deo," gloria. "An abbreviation of three words:" glory to the one God. "They are translated. And
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he thanks God for writing these works with Bach's help. He helped him write them. By the way, Tchaikovsky did the same thing. In Klin, his protégés are kept, where Tchaikovsky writes:" Thank God, I finished the finale. Thank God,
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I finished the first part after each great work. And he wants to distance himself from this creative delight. Not I, not I did it, because nothing can be done with this delight. Here is Chaliapin, too, when he wrote in his
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book that when I sing and am delighted with how my voice sounds, I am delighted with myself. I feel that the audience is indifferent. But when I sing and I am somewhere in heaven, I listen to myself from the outside and
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become, as it were, the audience, I feel that here my art reaches the listeners. Such is the paradox. And he also repeats this, because this is a different type of art. Here is composition, there is performance. And this prayer of thanksgiving was needed.
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But bach, bach, he knows that b a ch are notes. And also s d g are also three notes.
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With dg. These three notes, Bach's G, deogloria, glory to God alone, are included by Bach in almost every composition. Even, maybe not almost, but simply in every one. At a different pitch, and so on, and so on. Everywhere
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there are, as is known in polyphony, four variations. The main form, the rokokhod, the inversion, and the rokokhod of the inversion. Four main variations of this theme. And Bach uses them constantly. And it turns out that all of Bach's music is a hymn to God's
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glory. That's what happens. And it's also interesting how this intonation, of course, I think Nebach came up with it. Nebach came up with this correspondence between prayer and intonation. Bieber already had it, didn't he? Eh, the creator or the
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unconscious? Also an interesting question. But did Bach think about all of this? And Bieber, did he realize that a guardian angel is the companion of every person. The last sanata, right ? Here Bieber already thanks God at the
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end. Here in In the sixteenth mystical sanati, he recalls this. Did Bieber think about this? It's not that important. Did they all think about it?
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The thing is, the greater and more brilliant a composer, artist, sculptor, or poet is, the greater the role the unconscious plays in their work, because everything brilliant is born unconsciously. A person cannot create with their mind something that hasn't
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yet existed here, in this world. If they create something with their mind, try drawing a new animal. You'll take combinations of different animals and create something new. But you can't draw something that didn't exist. And therefore, mm, with Bach, this is the
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bottom of the underwater iceberg; it's much larger, because he's such a genius . It's not a genius work, it's an absolutely clear, purely masterful student work with an A +. It will repeat everything that humanity has done, developed. And this is also a
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huge amount of work, and a huge, so I'd say, honor to the one who did it. But it wouldn't be considered genius. I'm not saying that Bach has exactly this.
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And it doesn't matter at all, so to speak, whether he was able to realize it at this moment or not. Anyone who has tried to create something in any form of creativity understands that at some point they realize that someone is
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writing something with their hand, or fighting, or something like that. Here, this is a completely natural, normal moment. Alexei Tolstoy, the greatest poet, said this: "In vain do you imagine, O artist, that you are the creator of your creations; they are
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eternally carried.""And so on. We will return to this greatest, most important poem. And this motif of the Deo Gloria salt, it lives in art. If we follow the history of the motif, please, the second part is pathetic. M, please, uh,
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pictures from an exhibition. Mm, please , chap, cradle and other works. Fantasy . Or Tchaikovsky on a troika or Rachmaninoff's Lilac or his prelude in dominocracy, only there down to G major . And all this is the Deo Gloria salt.
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And then in Rachmaninoff it is already at the same height. And we can go on and on about Franck's symphony. An incredible number of the beginnings of the greatest works are based on this intonation. Consciously or unconsciously, it is completely
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unimportant. Therefore, let's leave this question. An artist friend of mine used to say this:" If I did it unconsciously, then my guardian angel did it consciously. He, he, he realized it for me. "That's how it is. Nothing.
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What's happening here in consciousness is only a small part of what's really happening in the world in general. This is about this intonation. And now the prelude develops further to a major key . We've gone through four bars. We've
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gone through, heard this fugue theme, which we haven't heard yet, but will only hear the fugue. And we're moving towards the point of the silver section , to this first, quietest climax, to a weak climax, which, if the real climax
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was in the twenty-third bar, should be somewhere around the twelfth or thirteenth bar, that's it. And so what's happening here? Is it there?
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It's not everywhere. But here, of course, it is. And look, at the point of the golden section we had BH. We talked about this at the beginning, BH.
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In general, it must be said that Bach very rarely uses this theme. Why? Because he doesn't push himself forward . At that time, the artist was only a servant of God. The artist was his humble servant. The artist was only a
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quill pen of God. And then, already in the 19th, especially in the 20th century, the artist would, so to speak, say that I, I, uh, then even Scriabin had this phrase:" I am God. "He sometimes talked too much in his
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visionary dreams. And this is such a huge path of art from the utmost modesty and invisibility of the Creator to his growing role and, as it were, the penetration of the divine into man.
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And let's remember there Shestakovich DSKh, yes, in the tenth symphony, the eighth quartet, how it all thunders up above. Even twice D. Why twice? Because Dmitry Dmitrievichkovich, yes, DDSKh.
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That's it. And this is not because it's bad, yes, because it's simply a completely different era. This is also brilliant in its own way. That's it.
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And here, of course, there is no need, so to speak, to single out this melody for pianists, yes, that's it. Play it like that. It will all be heard anyway.
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It's all hidden in these imperceptibly murmuring waves of this prelude. Remember Ski's novel about an urn of water, a maiden dropped her shoe and broke it. She broke it, according to Pushkin's words. That's where exactly Q takes this image of this gurgling water
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. And at the point of the silver section, Bach gives the same theme, Bach, only in mirror image. Look. I'm playing the twelfth measure. We'll shorten it, give a summary. That is, it's the same thing, only in reverse,
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in mirror image. And mirrors were few and far between, they were expensive. That's precisely the water that was the mirror. That's precisely where Bach, the stream, bam, comes in. That was precisely the mirror and was the very means in which one can see oneself.
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Music, art—that mirror in which the composer and the listener see themselves. That's a very important idea, speaking of this prelude. Water in this well-represented piano score, like And in the Gospel, which is very closely connected with this work. Water
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is a very important symbol. And a lot happens in the New Testament connected with water. Baptism in the river. Uh, is it a river or a lake? Jordan. Yes.
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Baptism in the Jordan. A lake, I think, anyway. Well, it doesn't matter. There. Then the Lake of Genesaret, the storm that Christ calms. Then the Samaritan woman. This is the scene where Christ asks her for a drink. Also water. And
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everywhere there is different water. There. But the invocation is not only about water. There are many instances when Bach uses invocation, and he is not sacred not only with water. We will recall this here. While we passed unnoticed, so to speak, this Bach
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hinted at the fact that he, Bach, is, so to speak, a reflection, a reflection of the palace. And then we descended into the silver section, into the quietest climax. Fifteenth, sixteenth measure. Sixteenth. The bass is important here. What's happening in the
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bass? The theme of the esfuge, the intonation of the theme. This was the center, the eighteenth central measure, and the nineteenth begins the culminating movement. The nineteenth repeats the first, only an octave lower . And here, you see, is the prelude,
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it's kind of three-part and two-part, although it's very difficult to make a division here. We begin the movement towards the culmination. Those same BACH. And it's interesting to remember this culminating measure how Bach's contemporaries, uh, despite the fact
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that they greatly respected and loved him, poorly understood this music. Take , for example, the first editor of the Well-Tempered Clavier, the famous composer Carl Czerny, a prolific man who wrote a bunch of intuitions that are played in all schools of music, and
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a most wonderful musician who completely created a ton of music, oratorios, fugues, and sanatas. And he was the first to understand that it needed to be published, and he did.
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This A grandiose work. But here he is in 1800, at the beginning of the 10th century, he takes this prelude and looks:" Aha, here are thirds, and here are seconds. "And he simply crosses out this one, the most central bar, the
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cultination bar. And after this bar, yes, so please, very, very harmonious. I just don't understand that Bach didn't write it by chance. And there will be several more such amusing cases for us now. It wasn't that important.
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And even when people copied it at that time, there wasn't, there was a way to publish, but it was incredibly cumbersome, difficult. And Bach published his first impression in 1831.
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This is incredible. He was already 46 years old. One opus. That's it. And the Well-Empire Clavier existed only in manuscripts. And that's why, when they copied it, they changed something. And it was believed until the end of the
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20th century that there was only one, that there were four Bach manuscripts of the Well-Empire Clavier. And when they began to study the handwriting with the help of a computer, they realized that only one manuscript could be considered Bach's. All the others
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belong to Bach's friends, relatives, but this is not Bach's own handwriting. And, of course, there are few differences here. In the second volume, there are many more differences. And there, so to speak, the entire second volume is not there, belonging to
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Bach's hand. We'll look at this later, talk about this later. Well, and so, approaching the end of our analysis of this prelude, there are a few bars on the so-called organ bass, G. Uh, and at the end, the thirty-second bar. Again,
Speaker A
B-bimol appears, that is, B, the first letter of Bach's surname. Then the thirty-third, A, and C right there. And here, at the end, Cibikar also veiledly carries out the BACH theme. We get the point of the silver section, the point
Speaker A
of the golden section, and the very end . Here is a curl, preceding the fugue theme. And the conclusion. Let's deal with the fugue in the next lecture.
Topics:BachPrelude in C majorBWV 846The Well-Tempered Claviergolden ratioAugenmusikmusic analysisclassical music lecturemusical symbolismfugue and prelude
