Le clavier bien tempéré I - Fugue 08 BWV 853

About this work

The eighth fugue takes time to establish its subject before bringing it back in increasingly close forms. Its motion remains restrained, but the intervening episodes set the voices in circulation and prevent the 87 bars from closing in on themselves. The tension grows from this alternation between statement and movement.

Locate every entry of the subject before playing. Give them a shared colour without accenting them harshly, then choose one secondary voice to follow in each episode. This focused listening prevents the polyphony from turning into a block of chords.

Building a long fugue

Divide the piece by its cadences rather than by page. Practise each section with a slow metronome, then connect two sections without stopping. Pedal should be brief and tied to harmonic changes; in the densest combinations, the fingers alone often produce a clearer result.

When an episode returns, first listen to the line that restarts the motion. The other voices may remain more discreet until the subject comes back. This shifting hierarchy makes it possible to traverse the piece without playing all the counterpoint at the same level.

What the engraving contains


Writing: the voices of the keyboard part share two staves.
Dimensions: the 87 bars require three US Letter pages. The audio rendering contains 1,420 attacks.
Edition: Bach's music is in the public domain. The LilyPond code prepared by Knute Snortum is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. LesPartitions.info compared the notes, generated the consultation files and signed each page with a discreet link.