The Well Tempered Clavier: Books 1 and 2 Complete: Books I and II, Complete (Dover Classical Piano Music)
£16.40
“His art was of an encyclopedic nature, drawing together and surmounting the techniques, the styles, and the general achievements of his own and earlier generations and leading to a new perspective.” — Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
This informed assessment of the genius of Bach’s works can be applied with greatest accuracy to The Well-Tempered Clavier. This highly influential work is monumental in the history of Western music. It represents not only the culmination of Bach’s own maturation process, but also the galvanization of the emerging style and structure of modern keyboard music.
The grace and fecundity of The Well-Tempered Clavier have thrilled audiences, musicians, and composers for centuries. Mozart, when rapidly advancing to the height of his mastery, had but to read a manuscript copy of The Well-Tempered Clavier and his style developed a new polyphonic richness and depth of harmony. Beethoven studied all the accessible works of Bach profoundly (including The Well-Tempered Clavier) and frequently quoted them in his sketchbooks, often with direct bearing on his own works. Chopin is nowhere more characteristic than when he shows his love of The Well-Tempered Clavier in his Etudes and Preludes. It was Schumann who, in a series of maxims for young musicians, said “Make The Well-Tempered Clavier your daily bread.”
This remarkable volume contains all 48 preludes and fugues, from Books I and II, in all major keys, reproduced directly from the authoritative Bach-Gesellschaft edition. The fine engraving is beautiful, clear, and easy to read. These elegant pieces, which vary in difficulty, are available complete in one low-cost, convenient Dover edition.
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Additional information
| Publisher | Dover Publications Inc. (1 Jan. 2009) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Paperback | 202 pages |
| ISBN-10 | 0486245322 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0486245324 |
| Dimensions | 23.85 x 1.19 x 30.91 cm |
by A. M. Warren
Don’t buy this edition unless you are confident about using your own fingering. It’s nice and cheap, but the print quality is a bit patchy and it doesn’t lie totally flat.
by Amazon Customer
Nothing wrong with this in my opinion. Has all of Book 1. Followed by all of Book 2. Printing is fine and is easy enough to read. Not the crispest quality but for the price you’re paying it’s good. For a paperback it’s remarkably sturdy: my copy has been through annotations, hours of being carried in my bag and has occasionally been thrown across my room in a fit of rage. However it still looks very respectable. If you want to use this book everyday and pass it on to your children then look for a higher quality version but for students and general normal use this is the one to go for. Also looks quite nice on your shelf which doesn’t hurt.
by dark fader
Book received in excellent condition, promptly and at a great price.
by Pierre R.
This is a useful reprint of the original 1924 Associated Board edition. Good to have if you want an ‘edited’ edition with commentary and fingerings. These should be taken with a grain of salt, but nevertheless constitute an interesting glimpse at early twentieth century performance practice.
by Philip Bourke
For my young son, gets great pieces form it for his piano playing
by dark fader
Review for the Kindle version only:
The book is presented as a series of captured images, with two entries in the table of contents: Book I and Book II.
Navigating to a particular piece is time-consuming and irritating.
The images are low quality and low resolution. Some ar slightly at an angle, some have text cut off, all have heavy JPEG artifacts and are low on detail.
On the Kindle Cloud Reader, there’s no way to zoom in to images, meaning blurry browser zooming is the only way to get the image to readable size.
Zooming in to an image makes changing page difficult, certainly not something you’ll want to do while playing.
Things aren’t much better on the Android Kindle app. The zoomed image quality may be slightly better, but moving from page to page is then incredibly longwinded and irritating.
A little more effort, put into higher quality page scans and better indexing would have made this a great purchase. As it is, it’s near useless. The kindle version feels like a money grab, not a serious product.
by Dr. J. Money-kyrle
The Dover Edition Bach series are a facsimile of the original Bachgesellschaft edition, the reduced slightly in size (the originals are huge, unmanageable reference volumes). It is a lovely edition to play from – the notes are printed very clearly, and there is very little in the way of additional phrasing marks or playing instructions (which, with Bach, is a matter of taste and opinion). After about 25 years my old copy is starting to get a bit ragged so I have bought this again as a replacement.
by *****
A well bound book. Good sized print and will be robust for the amount of practice required to play these gems.