Bach WTC Book 1 Prelude 1, à la Hewitt
As long as we’re conducting experiments on the familiar C major prelude…
Some years ago, Don and I heard Angela Hewitt play a marvelous concert of Bach and Messiaen. (There’s a combination!) She gave the most unusual performance of the C major prelude I’ve ever heard: very fast, very light, either a bit of pedal or just a superhuman legato (don’t remember which), and certain notes voiced to give the rapid running pattern some shape. It was almost impressionistic.
Now if there’s a right way to play this prelude, this is definitely not it. But it was really quite a marvelous treat to hear something so familiar in such a surprising new guise; if it wasn’t “right,” it sure was good!
Here is an imitation — a rather poor one, I’m afraid — of my memory of that performance:
The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1, Prelude 1 (in C major) à la HewittPaul Cantrell, pianoDownload (1:23 / 2.1 M)
Don and I both immediately ran off to get her recording of it, and were immediately disappointed: she played the piece in a completely ordinary way. It was fine; it just wasn’t at all the daring version we’d heard live. I came up with two theories about this:
- She came up with the novel interpretation in the few years between the recording and the concert, or
- afraid of critical reaction, she played it safe on the recording and left the risk-taking for the live performances.
I don’t know if the second theory was true here, but it’s definitely true in general: musicians don’t want to give critics anything to criticize, and thus focus first — particularly on recordings — on having no mistakes, no risks, nothing extreme, nothing wrong. The result of this is the current glut of recordings that are perfect but not very good.
To heck with that! Give me risk-taking! I’d rather hear performances that miss the mark half the time than the bland, play-it-safe perfectionism we usually get.
Comments
I love the energy in that; Bach rarely sounds so… insistent.
A minor nit: the volume level of this recording seems very low to me. Usually your recordings play reasonably loud on my system if I turn the volume up enough, but this time I had to crank it as high as it would go to make it listenable and even then it was pretty quiet.
Thanks for the pointer, Nick. I upped it 3 dB; hopefully that helps.
Ah, that’s much better.
“The result of this is the current glut of recordings that are perfect but not very good.”
That may well be the best-put and most true quote entered onto the entire Internet on the 30th.
Rock on Paul!
Make it live! There is life beyond which is appareant, and when we risk, sometimes it WORKS! it’s not my initianl conception /rememberance of this peice either, but hey! It’s alight of diamond!
todd
This is really interesting. As a kid I played the piano. And I stumbled on the well tempered pieces somehow. Never having heard them played, and on my own, this is very close to my interpretation (that is what I heard in my mind, not quite what my fingers did).
So to me this recording is much more “correct” than most others.
Yes, I’m always suspicious of the notion that there’s a correct way to play anything. The question I like to ask: does an interpretation work, or doesn’t it? This one sure worked when she did it.
Fabulous, light.
I love it.
Hewitt, while undeniably brilliant in concert-we saw her Goldbergs- can be strangely safe on recordings, though her blistering account of the Partitas is nothing to sneer at.
The best solo Bach I know of the kind you refer to here is either Maria Joao Pires doing the first Partita and a French Suite(DG), or Piotr Anderszewski doing Partitas 1, 3 and 6 (Virgin Classics).
Steel fingers both, and yet light as a souffle in each case.
How glad I am to have discovered your pages.
Do you realize that this is not the true version of Bach’s Prelude in C? The original prelude has 36 measures. This one has skipped measure 23.
I played this once like this recording. My mom came in the room and gave me the most confused look and was like “You’re rushing a little bit.”
I think it sounds cool like that.
I should try sending you a recording I have of this. Somebody recorded this on a harpsichord and it has a lot of rubato and a very different ending. You might find it quite interesting. I played it like this recording once and my choir teacher scolded me for it, so it must be a “risky” interpretation. Me likey.
This is about the way I play it (except I’m nowhere near as good) and I thought it was supposed to sound this way when played on a piano and all the regular recordings were doing it wrong. Your recording is wonderful, it sounds a piano performance instead of someone doing a harpsichord performance on a piano.
I too noticed measure 23 skipped - i FIRST noticed it when i wanted to play the piece on guitar like my “hero” Parkening did…i got the music for it by buying the collection for piano of the WTC book 1 and transcribed it for guitar - then learned it - THEN played Parkening’s version again and found HE was missing measure 23…
I wonder if it is apocryphal or not but it seems to me the absence of it breaks the harmonic motion of the baseline and the inclusion of it sounds perfectly natural.
Dan & Sergei: As with most of Bach’s music, there are multiple sources, none of them absolutely authoritative. Different editions of the WTC are actually different!
What you hear is the 1863 Bach-Gesellschaft edition. From the perspective of that edition, your copy has an extra measure inserted at 23! But in fact, neither is the “true” edition — they are just two slightly different versions passed down from Bach, and we have no way of knowing which he would choose today.
Please cast away any idea that there is a single “true” version of the piece (or a single correct way to play it)!
Actually, Measure no 23 in the 36 measures version is not from the original autographed copy of the WTC. It is called the “Schwencke measure”. it is not known if Bach made changes to the prelude after being published, or if Schwenke Himself added the measure. Scholars often choose the one with 35 measures.