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George Frideric Handel was born as Georg Friedrich Händel in Halle in the Duchy of Magdeburg (province of Brandenburg-Prussia) to Georg and Dorothea (née Taust) Händel in 1685, the same year that both J.S. Bach and Domenico Scarlatti were born. Handel displayed considerable musical talent at an early age; by the age of seven he was a skilful performer on the harpsichord and pipe organ, and ...
- Brandenburg Concertos
- Four Orchestral Suites
- St Matthew Passion
- Cantata No.21
- Organ Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor, BWV542
- The Well-Tempered Clavier – The 48
- Goldberg Variations
- Six Cello Suites
- Violin Sonatas and Partitas
- Concerto in D Minor For Two Violins
Many Baroque composers wrote dozens, or even hundreds, of concertos but Bach managed to sum up the entire genre with only six, each featuring a different line-up of soloists with a wide range of moods and even structures (shocking in an era when concertos were supposed to have three movements: fast-slow-fast). So we leap from the dizzying heights o...
Alongside the concerto, the other genre in vogue in Bach’s time was the orchestral suite (or “overture” as he called it). Whereas the concerto came out of an Italian tradition the suite was, in origin, a sequence of French dances. While all four of Bach’s have a kind of courtly nobility beyond that they range enormously: from the gracious sequence ...
Passions are large-scale choral works telling of the suffering and death of Christ, and none come finer than those of Bach, of which two have come down to us: the St John and the St Matthew. The latter is one of the great icons of music, but after Bach’s death, it went unperformed for nearly 80 years until a young Felix Mendelssohnreintroduced it t...
Bach’s cantatas (nearly 200 sacred and a good handful of secular ones survive) are all the more remarkable when you think that this was real bread-and-butter stuff, produced for the church services every week. This meant they had to be performable without much rehearsal; so either the congregation endured some pretty ropey playing, or Bach’s musici...
Bach was particularly admired for his keyboard skills, not least his knack for improvisation; much of his organ music probably started out life as just that – a doodle turned into something mighty. Leaving aside the most famous organ work of all, the Toccata and Fugue in D minor (which some doubt is by Bach at all), one of the most brilliant works ...
Bach was not merely one of the greatest composing geniuses in history; he was also a devoted family man, and frequently wrote keyboard music as a teaching aid for his many children. The Well-Tempered Clavier is a set of preludes and fugues in all 24 major and minor keys (48 works in all). If that sounds a little dry, then just remember this is Bach...
Ultimately with Bach, you can either spend ages trying to analyse why his music is so endlessly compelling or, as with the Goldberg Variations(purportedly written to soothe an insomniac nobleman to sleep) you can just enjoy it. Designed for harpsichord, but equally enthusiastically claimed by pianists, it consists of a lyrical theme with 30 variati...
While it’s easy enough for the keyboard to stand alone, string instruments have a harder time of it. Bach’s solo Cello Suitesare immensely difficult, not least because he was determined to make the instrument sound self-sufficient. They vanished for years from the repertoire, only to be rediscovered and subsequently celebrated when the great Catala...
Violinists have no need to envy the Cello Suites, since Bach left them an equivalent solo work: the Sonatas and Partitas. The most famous of them is the ‘D Minor Partita’, with its fiendish and epic final ‘Chaconne’, in which a simple theme is varied no fewer than 64 times, to extraordinary emotional effect. Equally effective is the ‘E Major Partit...
Bach didn’t leave many solo concertos, but this one is a gem, easily up there with the best Bach works of all time. Featuring two violinists with a simple string-and-harpsichord accompaniment, it is particularly beloved for its rhapsodic slow movement (shamelessly plundered by myriad film directors for moments of high emotion), in which the two sol...
Jan 30, 2017 · Vincent P. de Luise George Frideric Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach, the towering musical giants of the Baroque, were both coincidently born in Germany about a month apart, in 1685. They also shared the musical style distinctive of the high Baroque characterized by the masterful use of counterpoint and fugal composition. Handel’s oratorios, notably Messiah and Samson,
Mar 24, 2017 · Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Art of Fugue is a work of high art. But in keeping with the late works of artists such as Shakespeare, Beethoven and Goya, it contains elements of pathos, humour ...
- Daniel Herscovitch
BR-CPEB: works by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (for this composer Helm or Wotquenne numbers are however more often used) BR-JCFB: works by Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach; Fk (or) F Falck catalogue numbers for works by Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, e.g. BWV 970 = F 25/2 H Helm numbers for works by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, e.g. BWV 1036 = H 569 HWV
Aug 18, 2017 · Further, the notion that Bach began work and worked intensively dur-ing his last years, or even months, on his monument to the contrapuntal art, Die Kunst der Fuge ( BWV 1080), is contradicted by the careful study of the autograph first version. This score is a fair copy which is on the same paper as the Peasant Cantata ( BWV 212) of 1742.
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Aug 14, 2023 · 7. Well-Tempered Clavier, BWV 846-893. Two volumes of preludes and fugues in all major and minor keys make up Bach’s “ Well-Tempered Clavier, BWV 846-893,” an unrivaled treasure trove of keyboard study. Each composition is a miniature of inventiveness and a monument to his mastery of counterpoint and harmony.
