mikrokosmos:

Bach – Sonata in C Major, BWV 966

Of the few keyboard sonatas Bach wrote, this one is the most “luminous” to me. That is, it feels so bright and almost divine. Maybe that’s too sappy, I don’t know. But the opening chord is a basic C major triad but dispersed to give a very open and wide colorful sound. We slowly rise, simple counterpoint carries us forward in fragments of the original idea, three voices singing together in waves. The allemande takes us into a moderately flowing string of notes, a lot of emphasis on harmony in thirds. The adagio thins the texture out more, opening with a monophonic passage, before including a reaction from the left hand. This introduction is cut by an allegro section that makes the character more sunny. This acts as a transition into the fugue on a long subject that moves up and down [again] like a wave. The fugue carries us through this burst of energy and light until winding down to a glorious coda. The most interesting part of this sonata is that it isn’t original music by Bach. It seems to be a transcription of some kind after a partita by Johann Adam Reincken, a German/Dutch composer who was considered one of the most important German baroque composers before Bach and had strongly influenced J.S. Unfortunately we do not have much of his music, and so I cannot find the original work that inspired this sonata, but it is a good thing Bach saved this angelic work that otherwise would have been lost to time.

Movements:

1. Prelude

2. Allemande

3. Adagio

4. Fugue

Sviatoslav Richter, piano