Clavier-Übung III

In 1775, he expanded on this to Bach's biographer Johann Nikolaus Forkel noting that his father had studied not only the works of Buxtehude, Böhm, Nicolaus Bruhns, Fischer, Frescobaldi, Froberger, Kerll, Pachelbel, Reincken and Strunck, but also of "some old and good Frenchmen.

Finally in BWV 682, Vater unser in Himmelreich (the Lord's Prayer), a pivotal point, where the manual and pedal parts are exchanged, occurs at bar 41, which is the sum of the numerical order of letters in JS BACH (using the Baroque convention[28] of identifying I with J and U with V).

Christe, aller Welt Trost uns Sünder allein du hast erlöst; Jesu, Gottes Sohn, unser Mittler bist in dem höchsten Thron; zu dir schreien wir aus Herzens Begier, eleison!

Over the final line of the cantus firmus, the crotchet figures drop successively by semitones with dramatic and unexpected dissonances, recalling a similar but less extended passage at the end of the five-part chorale prelude O lux beata of Matthias Weckmann.

O Jesus Christ, enthroned on high, The Father's Son beloved By Whom lost sinners are brought nigh, And guilt and curse removed; Thou Lamb once slain, our God and Lord, To needy prayers Thine ear afford, And on us all have mercy.

The pastoral quality in the organ writing for the upper voices at the opening has been interpreted as representing the serenity before the Fall of Man; it is followed by the disorder of sinful waywardness; and finally order is restored in the closing bars with the calm of salvation.

The American musicologist David Yearsley [nl] has described the chorale prelude as follows:[51] "This energetic, syncopated counterpoint is elaborated above a recurring two-bar theme in the pedal that acts like a ritornello whose continual reappearances are separated by lengthy rests.

Below is the text of the first and last verses of Luther's hymn with the English translation by Charles Sanford Terry:[39] Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir, Herr Gott, erhör mein Rufen.

This smaller manualiter setting of Aus tiefer Noth schrei' ich zu dir is a four-part chorale motet in the key of F♯ minor, with the augmented cantus firmus in the phrygian mode of E in the uppermost soprano part.

Er spricht selber:Kommt, ihr Armen, Laßt mich über euch erbarmen; Kein Arzt ist dem Starken not, Sein Kunst wird an ihm gar ein Spott.

The chorale prelude Jesus Christus, unser Heiland BWV 688 is a trio sonata with the upper voices in quavers and semiquavers the manuals and the cantus firmus in minims in the pedal in the Dorian mode of G, like a Gregorian chant.

This great man would be the admiration of whole nations if he had more amenity, if he did not take away the natural element in his pieces by giving them a turgid and confused style, and if he did not darken their beauty by an excess of art.In 1737, two years before the publication of Clavier-Übung III, Johann Adolf Scheibe had made the above notoriously unfavourable comparison between Bach and another composer of the time, now identified as Georg Frideric Handel.

His comments represented a change in contemporary musical aesthetics: he advocated the simpler and more expressive galant style, which after Bach's death in 1750 would be further developed during the classical period, in preference to fugal or contrapuntal writing, which by then was considered old-fashioned and out-moded, too scholarly and conservative.

The first of the two volumes of Marpurg's Treatise on fugue (Abhandlung von der Fuge, 1753–1754) cites the opening segment of the six-part fugal chorale prelude Aus tiefer Noth BWV 686 as one of its examples.

The reception of the works was mixed, partly because of their technical difficulty: composers like Mozart, Beethoven and Rust embraced these compositions, particularly The Well-Tempered Clavier; but, as Johann Adam Hiller reported in 1768, many amateur musicians found them too hard ("Sie sind zu schwer!

I never have seen a fugue by this learned and powerful author upon a motivo, that is natural and chantant; or even an easy and obvious passage, that is not loaded with crude an difficult accompaniments.Burney reflected the English predilection for opera when he added: If Sebastian Bach and his admirable son Emmanuel, instead of being music-directors in commercial cities, had been fortunately employed to compose for the stage and public of great capitals, such as Naples, Paris, or London, and for performers of the first class, they would doubtless have simplified their style more to the level of their judges; the one would have sacrificed all unmeaning art and contrivance, and the other have been less fantastical and recherché; and both, by writing a style more popular, would have extended their fame, and been indisputably the greatest musicians of the eighteenth century.Johann Nikolaus Forkel, from 1778 the director of music in the University of Göttingen, was another promoter and collector of Bach's music.

How often has the evening twilight soothed with its friendly quiet my eyes, tired-out with questing, by blending the scattered parts into masses which now stood simple and large before my soul, and at once my powers unfolded rapturously to enjoy and understand.In 1782, Johann Friedrich Reichardt, since 1775 the successor to Agricola as Capellmeister in the court of Frederic the Great, quoted this passage from Goethe in the Musicalisches Kunstmagazin to describe his personal reactions to the instrumental fugues of Bach and Handel.

More significant for the 19th-century English Bach revival was the presence of a younger generation of German-speaking musicians in London, well versed in the theoretical writings of Kirnberger and Marpurg on counterpoint but not dependent on royal patronage; these included John Casper Heck (c. 1740 – 1791), Charles Frederick Baumgarten (1738–1824) and Joseph Diettenhofer (c. 1743 – c. 1799).

The English organist Edward Holmes commented in 1835 that Mendelssohn's recitals in St Paul's Cathedral "gave a taste of his quality which in extemperaneous performance is certainly of the highest kind ... he has not we believe kept up that constant mechanical exercise of the instrument which is necessary to execute elaborate written works."

In 1837, despite having performed the St Anne prelude and fugue in England to great acclaim, on his return to Germany Mendelssohn still felt dissatisfied, writing that, "This time I have resolved to practice the organ her in earnest; after all, if everyone takes me for an organist, I am determined, after the fact, to become one."

In the final version, Reger inserted an intermezzo (a scherzo and trio) as the third movement and expanded the adagio to contain a central section on the Lutheran hymns Aus tiefer Not and O Haupt voll Blut und Bunden.

The second movement is an adagio in ternary form, with the beginning of the central section directly inspired by the setting of Aus tiefer Not in the pedaliter chorale prelude BWV 686 of Clavier-Übung III, paying homage to Bach as a composer of instrumental counterpoint.

The organ in St Paul's Cathedral commissioned in 1694 from Father Smith and completed in 1697, with a case by Christopher Wren, had exceptionally already been fitted with a 25-key pedalboard (two octaves C-c') of pull-down German pedals in the first half of the 18th century, probably as early as 1720, on the recommendation of Handel.

In June 1808 after a concert the Hanover Square Rooms during which Weseley performed some excerpts from the '48', he commented that, "this admirable Musick might be played into Fashion; you see I have only risked one modest Experiment, & it has electrified the Town just in the way that we wanted."

He promoted the organ music of Bach and in 1845 produced the first English edition of the chorale prelude Wir glauben BWV 680 from Clavier-Übung III, published by Hollier & Addison, which he dubbed the "Giant Fugue" because of its striding pedal part.

The completed organ had four manual keyboards and a thirty key pedalboard, with 17 sets of pedal pipes and a range from CC to f. The instrument had unequal temperament and, as Wesley had stipulated, the air supply came from two large underground bellows powered by an eight horse-power steam engine.

One exception was a public performance in the Paris Conservatoire in December 1833, repeated two years later in the Salons Pape, of the opening allegro of Bach's concerto for three harpsichords BWV 1063, played on pianos by Chopin, Liszt and Hiller.

He also met Mendelssohn's sister Fanny, herself an accomplished concert pianist and by then married to the artist Wilhelm Hensel: Gounod described her as "an outstanding musician and a woman of superior intelligence, small, slender, but gifted with an energy which showed in her deep-set eyes and in her burning look".

In the aftermath of the French Revolution, there had already been a revival of interest in France in choral music of the baroque and earlier periods, particularly of Palestrina, Bach and Handel: Alexandre-Étienne Choron founded the Institution royale de musique classique et religieuse in 1817.

[93] There were further indications of changes in taste in France: Saint-Saëns, organist at the Madeleine from 1857 to 1877, refused to perform operatic arias as part of the liturgy, on one occasion replying to such a request, "Monsieur l'Abbé, when I hear from the pulpit the language of the Opéra Comique, I will play light music.