Prelude & Fugue in F Major - The Well-Tempered Clavier II - Johann Sebastian Bach | Piano Tutorial

The Prelude and Fugue in F major, BWV 880, from the second book of the Well-Tempered Clavier, forms a vivid diptych in which a flowing, improvisatory prelude is set against a compact and dance-like fugue. The prelude unfolds in the manner of an unmeasured French lute prelude, its texture built from a continuous stream of eighth notes that weave through four voices and create a sense of expansive harmonic resonance. After a four-bar introduction, the piece proceeds through a sequence of clearly articulated sections: an opening area in F major, a cadence to D that introduces a new motif, a return to F followed by a transitional passage, and a restatement of the opening material in the subdominant key. The prelude closes with a short coda that gathers the harmonic threads and resolves the movement with reflective poise. Its overall character is rich, free, and harmonically generous, with the flowing rhythmic surface contributing to a sense of improvisatory breadth. The fugue offers a sharply contrasting response through its brisk pacing, rhythmic animation, and lightly jubilant character reminiscent of a gigue. Written in three voices and set in 2/4 time, it begins with a subject whose rising intervals mirror the upward gestures heard in the prelude, creating a subtle motivic link between the two movements. The subject opens with two ascending figures that reach the sixth degree of the scale, followed by a cascade of sixteenth notes that rise to the octave before descending back to F. The fugue’s structure departs from the more standard pattern through the presence of an unusually long episode, built from just a few motivic fragments, which occupies a large portion of the interior. A recapitulation appears around the midpoint, reaffirming the thematic material before the fugue moves through a series of brief modulations and then returns to F major near the close. The result is a compact but spirited piece whose rhythmic vitality and structural clarity form an effective complement to the prelude’s spacious, improvisatory character.