Bach's Prelude in C minor, BWV 934 — the score is on screen: forty bars with a repeat, opening out to sixty bars and one minute thirty-four. 3/4 in C minor, one line in each hand, and no chords anywhere. It is the second piece in the book Bach wrote for beginners — the one that comes before the Well-Tempered Clavier. The difficulty is keeping the right hand's broken chords even and the left hand's long line unbroken. The full piano score is on screen, note by note.
The difficulty is an even right hand and an unbroken left
What this drills is two hands working independently. The right runs broken chords, the left walks a line, and both have to hold at once — the core of Bach's teaching pieces and the way into all polyphony after them.
Keep the right hand flat. Every note of the broken chords wants the same weight and length; one heavy note and the harmony's shape disappears behind it.
Let the left hand sing. It is a second melody, not an accompaniment — the notes must connect as they change, or the line vanishes.
Bars 20 and 40 are the joins, both dropping to six notes where the phrase breathes and the repeat turns — and joins are where the tempo sags.
There are no chords anywhere, just nine notes a bar between the two hands: an open page, kind to anyone building reading speed. No pedal is marked, so this one connects with the fingers.
The tempo is 120 to the quarter. There is no metronome mark and not even a tempo word on the page — Bach left no tempo indications in the Six Little Preludes — so the figure is worked back from the usual performing length: a hundred and eighty beats at 120 puts the piece at one minute thirty, the middle of the 1:20 to 1:40 these performances run.
We rate this 3 out of 5.
Ninety seconds of two lines making way for each other
The right hand starts running broken chords in bar 1 — three notes, three notes, like water — while the left walks a much slower line underneath.
What makes this piece good is not the tune but the relation between the two lines: the right hand lays out the harmony and the left decides where it goes, so the "next step" you hear is always the left hand moving first.
0:18, 0:33, 0:48, 1:03 and 1:18 each begin a section, nothing pausing between them — Bach's preludes are written in one breath.
Around 0:33 it moves further into the minor, the harmony turning and the tension gathering; after 1:03 it begins to close, settling back onto the C minor chord.
It works well as background: ninety seconds, steady throughout, with no loud moment, and short enough to sit well in a playlist on repeat — which is how Bach's keyboard miniatures were always heard.
Forty written bars become sixty
Forty written bars with one repeat over the second half, opening out to sixty bars and five hundred and thirty-one sounding notes, in 3/4 and C minor, with two dynamics and no pedal and no hairpins at all — normal for Baroque keyboard notation.
Bar counts run between six and ten, averaging eight point eight, and almost every bar holds nine — a very open page. They drop to six at bars 20, 40 and 60: the end of the first half, the join before the repeat, and the close.
There are no chords. One line in each hand, broken chords in threes on the right and single notes on the left — which is why the page is easy to follow, with nothing stacked.
The range is D2 to A sharp 5, a little over three and a half octaves, and the shortest note lasts 0.125 seconds. A hundred and eighty-eight slurs and two hundred and one articulations — this edition phrases in unusual detail.
He wrote the teaching material as music
The Six Little Preludes, BWV 933 to 938, were written for beginners, and belong with the Clavier-Büchlein for Wilhelm Friedemann Bach — the notebook Bach compiled for his eldest son, begun in 1720 when the boy was nine.
Bach taught a great many pupils, several of them his own children, in a designed order: minuets and little preludes first, then the Inventions and Sinfonias, and only then the Well-Tempered Clavier. This piece sits on the second step.
He wrote no tempo indications in them. Baroque keyboard notation generally leaves out dynamics, pedalling and tempo — the player reads them out of the notes, which is why recorded lengths differ so much.
A "little prelude" is not a small prelude. A prelude began as an improvised warm-up before the real piece; Bach wrote them as free-standing music, and the form settled from there. Writing teaching material as music was his habit: the title page of the Well-Tempered Clavier calls it a work for the use and profit of musical young people eager to learn.
Five more in the same book, and the Inventions are the next step
The Six Little Preludes, BWV 933 to 938, run C major, this C minor, D minor, D major, E major and E minor. None of the other five has been made yet.
The next step up is the Inventions, and the channel has Invention No. 1 in C major, BWV 772. Above those is the Well-Tempered Clavier, of which the channel has the Prelude in C major, BWV 846 and its Fugue, both in the Well-Tempered Clavier playlist.
This piece is not in that playlist — the Six Little Preludes are a different collection, and folding them in would make that cluster page inaccurate.
