Works for keyboard by J.S. Bach

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The keyboard works of the German composer Johann Sebastian Bach, originally written for organ, clavichord, and harpsichord, are among the most important and well-known of his compositions. Widely varied and ranging over the entire span of his lifetime, they are a central part of the modern repertoire for keyboard.

Bach was himself a prodigious talent at the keyboard, well-known during his lifetime both for his technical abilities and for improvisation. Many of Bach's keyboard works started out as improvisations.

During the long period of neglect that Bach suffered as a composer after his death extending to his rediscovery during the nineteenth century, he was known almost exclusively through his music for the keyboard, in particular his highly influential pantonal series of Preludes and Fugues in the Well-Tempered Clavier, which were regularly assigned as part of musicians' training. Composers and performers such as Ludwig van Beethoven and Camille Saint-Saëns first showed off their skills as child prodigies playing the entire cycle of Bach's 48 Preludes and Fugues.

Modern composers have continued to draw inspiration from Bach's keyboard output. Dmitri Shostakovich, for example, wrote his own set of Preludes and Fugues after the Bach model. Jazz musicians and composers, in particular, have been drawn to the contrapuntal style, harmonic expansion and rhythmic expression of Bach's compositions, especially the works for keyboard.

1 Works for Organ
2 Works for Harpsichord
3 Publication History
4 See also
5 Media

[edit] Works for Organ

During his lifetime, Bach was best known as an organist and his output for that instrument (BWV 525 - 771) was considerable and widely played during his lifetime. Among his better known pieces for organ are the two Toccatas and Fugues in D minor, BWV 538 and BWV 565 and the chorale Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme (BWV 645) (itself a transcription from Cantata 140 commonly referred to by the same name.

Although his music for organ was heavily influenced by German, French and Italian predecessors (such as Dieterich Buxtehude), Bach expanded the traditional idiom in several ways. First, he employed a much wider structural range than had traditionally been the case.

Second, Bach expanded the musical idiom of the organ by writing pieces that exceeded earlier technical standards. Four-, five- and six-part fugues, which Bach was famously able to improvise on the spot, employed a larger expressive range for the organ than had typically been the case.

Ironically, the authorship of a number of Bach's best known works for organ, such as the little Fugue in G minor BWV 578, is under dispute. Modern scholarship now attributes this and other works to Bach's pupils, especially Johann Tobias Krebs.

[edit] Works for Harpsichord

Bach wrote widely for the harpsichord, producing numerous inventions, suites, fugues, partitas, overtures, as well as keyboard arrangements of music originally scored for other instruments.

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[edit] Publication History

Many of Bach's works for keyboard were published in Bach's own lifetime, by the composer himself, under the title Clavier-Übung (Keyboard Practice) I-IV. The first volume, Bach's Opus 1, was published in 1731, while the last was published a decade later. The volumes are an open imitation of two volumes published by Bach's Leipzig predecessor Johann Kuhnau under the same title. Kuhnau used arrayed keys to structure his exercises, a model which Bach emulated through the Clavier-Übung volumes. The Well-Tempered Clavier, however, was not published until half a century after Bach's death, although they were in circulation before that in manuscript form. Of the four Clavier-Übung works, the first, second and last contain music written for harpsichord, while the third is devoted to compositions for organ.