Bach’s Keyboard Music

Along with Beethoven's sonatas and the purely idiomatic works for piano of Chopin and Debussy, the solo keyboard music of Johann Sebastian Bach represents the heart of the pianist's repertory; in the more specialized field of music for the organ, Bach's primacy seems beyond challenge. This listener's guide to Bach's music for the keyboard provides the interested amateur with a close but non-technical look at these two crucial parts of the master's oeuvre. The composer's tendency to work exhaustively in tightly structured formats - such as the forty-eight preludes and fugues of The Well-Tempered Clavier - provides a natural framework for this study; but the power, beauty, high polish, and occasionally the sheer strangeness of Bach's imagination are carefully examined as well.