Fugue no 1 in C major, BWV 846

About this work

Four adjacent notes are enough to launch the first fugue in the collection. The subject rises calmly, falls back, then passes from one voice to another. Its simplicity makes every entry easy to recognise, but also exposes problems of balance at once: if the accompaniment grows too loud, the counterpoint loses its relief.

Locate the four opening statements before playing the complete texture. Sing the subject, then mark its returns in the score. When two lines cross, think about their direction rather than the hand playing them. The requested legato does not mean that everything must remain at the same level; one voice can recede while another begins to speak.

Keeping the voices clear

Practise in pairs of voices, with settled fingering and a steady pulse. Add the bass next, then the final line. In dense passages, lighten the intervening notes and reserve slightly more weight for the beginnings of the subject. The 27 bars work best as a single progression, without slowing at every new entry.

About this edition


Scoring: solo keyboard, with four voices distributed across two staves.
Files: the printable score occupies two pages. The MIDI playback preserves 753 attacks and the complete range of the engraving.
Source and rights: Bach is in the public domain. Knute Snortum publishes this LilyPond edition under CC BY-SA 4.0. After checking the 27 bars, LesPartitions.info produced the internal editable files, placed a discreet backlink on the pages and prepared the teaching text.