1 TIP ON BACH'S PRELUDE IN C MINOR BWV 847 (WTC 1) 

Thanks Han, really glad to read this!

Great this was helpful, Jack, thanks for letting me know

Great that I could help you ! Go #discover beauty in Bach :-)

"This is one of the difficultest peace of Bach music" Trust me, it is not. I am working through this piece, I am a rather beginner pianist and it is hard, I have spent some six months and I am almost one page down out of two. That said, every single fugue in WTC is harder than this. Because fugues are hard and Bach's fugues are doubly so.

@@mitechko when we are beginners (as I am, on the piano) we think that knowing all the notes on the right tempo is enough to play the song correctly. But after a while we notice that, although indispensable, it's far from enough to play a piece in a good way. Articulation, dynamics, consistency, tone, etc play a big part on the quality. So when people say that's the hardest Bach piece, they are talking about these subtleties. Nonetheless, I kind of agree with you. I am also playing piano for less than a year. 3 months, when you wrote this comment, i was also playing this piece for 6 months. I already knew all the notes by heart, but I played it miserably with MANY mistakes. Today, I play it a little better, but still far from acceptable. The easy part of this song is that there's no polyrhythm. Both hands are doing the same thing almost all the time. I tried the first fugue and it was really hard, so i kind of saved it for later.

@@mitechko I always say there are two kinds of difficult: there is difficult for fingers and difficult for brain. This prelude is difficult for fingers but any fugue is more difficult for brain. As an adult piano beginner who has 13 years in musical training but only 4 playing piano, fugues are easier for me than this prelude and some etudes. Because I can deconstruct a fugue and analyze it, I have written few and all there is left is to play it. But I really struggle with technically difficult pieces.

Thanks Shirley !

Hmm... I do have a taste for the mechanical, and I disaprove the notion that a stiff, clockwork performance is inherently worse. If the player is artful enough, that stiffness may portray entrapment, rigidity, etc, which are all valid things to portray. What I do criticise is an absent-minded performance, an absence of presence, and on the rush to go fast many players fall for that.

ou i lost the heart only why i change one word in my text? strange youtube....

Hanon is not bad...! I would say for excercices, Czerny's opus 337 might be more enjoyable

@@AuthenticSound Thank you

It's a clavichord!

Well that explains it !!

thanks both of you. thta made my day haha

Okay I think I can answer my own question. The A on the clavircord must not be 440hz, but something else?

Your son has a good ear! Yes, the clav is tuned at A 408, I have made a series of vids on tuning: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-vz75ZErVNGM.html

Thank you I really appreciate your getting back to us. Mystery solved! My son will be very excited that you answered. We will watch these videos you have linked for sure. Yes he has a good ear. Now that he knows about different tuning, I suspect he'll be able to tell how an instrument is tuned pretty easily if he can see and hear a note played.

found your live masterclass on this work, thank you!

That bar is a mystery, since, indeed the indication of "presto" -if it would be really by Bach is hard to say, but there are sources close to him anyway, could mean double tempo in this context, but I don't feel that either in that spot. So, at the end, there are many places like this, where we can at most create a certain amount of "possibilities" rather than absolute solutions, and then... we choose !

In my perfect rendition of the prelude, everything would come to a head-rushing climax at bar 30, like as you say as that rolling ball following gravity, echoing the emotions. Those two voices are magic at that point.

I also felt so too .especially with the diminished and Dominant 7ths

a'=408

do you have perfect pitch

@@barronhung8246 nope yeah apparently it's baroque pitch which is a bit lower

What

There is 2 approach. Either you play it by heart, or as Wim Winters do you play it by heart, but with the music sheet in front of you. I prefer the second option too. Especially if you are lucky to have a Facsimile edition, that's the gift Bach gave to the mankind.