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The Well-Tempered February - Commentary #1
Sky Blue
Prelude in C, BWV 846
00:00 / 02:02

Prelude in C Major, BWV 846

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Like many of you, I suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, brought on by the dark days and long nights of the winter.  Growing up in England at a latitude of 51.75 (the same latitude as Calgary), the only recourse during the winter months was to take a bus to London and see the Christmas Lights, which we never did.  So it was a particularly perverse choice to go to Finland for six months, which it is dark out when you wake up at 8:00, dark when you have breakfast at 9:00, and dark when you set off to work at 10:00.  The solution, as I've said before, is color.  From 9:30 to 10:00, after I've had my breakfast, I color pictures until the sun begins to rise.  It's standard therapy for SADs (was there ever a more perfect acronym?), and the Finns know it - when you ask for "coloring books for adults" they immediately show you where to find them, with a sympathetic look that says "you too?"  Colored paper, colored bus passes, colored backs of bank cards: it's all part of the same philosophy that a spectrum a day keeps the blackness away. 

 

At the same time, I have been playing Bach as a form of meditative exercise, annoying the neighbors  by actually practicing the pieces for 2 hours every late afternoon and early evening.  And suddenly the penny dropped:  this is color therapy too.  For what is the F major Prelude but a Spring morning, clad in rising green?  What is the Prelude in C if not a clear blue sky, the kind that perfect blue that became famous after 9/11 as "severe clear"?   In the first Prelude, you can see for ever:  there's not a cloud in the horizon.  I've written about the Prelude in C elsewhere, so this is a good place to lay out the idea of the whole project.  There are 24 hours in a day.  There are 24 pencils in the box of Stabilo Watercolor pencils I have in front of me, purchased for €9.95 at Suomalainen Books.  And there are 24 Preludes & Fugues in each book of the Well-Tempered Klavier (that's why it's called "The 48").  The 48 Preludes & Fugues of the Well-Tempered Klavier are actually 96 separate pieces:  24 Preludes x 24 Fugues x 2 books.  I propose to play the first quarter of them, #1-24, over the month of February 2020.   That will take me up to the Fugue in F minor in Book 1.  Maybe in some later February I'll try the second 24 (F# major - B minor), and the third (C major - F minor in Book 2), and the fourth (you get the idea).  With an extra day for leap year, I have 29 chances to get this first set right.  Some of them are easy, some are fiendishly hard; there will be days when I record nothing just to practice.  And there will be mistakes, false starts, and far too much pedal.  But the colors will shine through.  This exercise, which I am calling "The Well-Tempered February," is for all you Seasonal Affective Disorder sufferers out there, to bring a brief band of color into our lives.  It will also be a way of paying the proper respect to the wonderful Grotrian Steinway upright in Johnny Riquet's apartment here in Pirkankatu 24.  And finally, it will be a chance for me to pay homage to the composer after whom I was named, who has always been my chief inspiration, and my Virgilian guide.

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The CD liner notes for the Sviatoslav Richter performance of the Well-Tempered Klavier that I got from the amazing public library in Tampere (which also had Urtext editions of the late Beethoven Piano sonatas - several of them!) says that there isn't much that readily identifies a connection between each Prelude and Fugue, except the shared opus number:  "Although attempts have been made to discover motivic similarities between the two pieces, they are not very convincing, and today it is generally held that Bach could only have had a very loose connection in mind."  Like most CD liner notes, this is dead wrong.  They are connected by COLOR and MOOD.  Just looking at Book I, the B minor Prelude is blue, and the B minor Fugue is darkest indigo.  The E-flat Prelude is yellow, and the E-flat Fugue is dazzling gold.  I have always heard keys in different colors - I don't know of a musician who doesn't.  D major will always be red, E major emerald green, C minor is black:  there is no escaping these connections.  And the Prelude in C major is the dazzling blue of a September sky.

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Here's the lot of them, with links to the commentaries as they come in:

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Prelude in C major - Sky Blue

Fugue in C major - Ocean Blue

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Prelude in C minor - Black

Fugue in C minor - Violet

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Prelude in C# major - White

Fugue in C# major - Silver

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Prelude in C# minor - Forest Green

Fugue in C# minor - Indigo

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Prelude in D major - Red

Fugue in D major - Crimson

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Prelude in D minor - Orange

Fugue in D minor - Ochre

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Prelude in E-flat major - Yellow

Fugue in E-flat major - Gold

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Prelude in E-flat minor - Peach

Fugue in E-flat minor - Coral

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Prelude in E major - Emerald Green

Fugue in E major - Teal

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Prelude in E minor - Dark Blue

Fugue in E minor - Magenta

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Prelude in F major - Spring Green

Fugue in F major - Olive Green

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Prelude in F minor - Light Brown

Fugue in F minor - Dark Brown

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Oddly, these are exactly the 24 colors in my pencil set.  Go figure...

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1st set.jpg
2nd set.jpg
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