Let’s take the second leg of our journey through Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavichord Book II.

This time, we’ll hear Christophe Rousset, playing on another Johannes Ruckers harpsichord. This one is kept at the Château de Versailles. It was built in 1628 and restored in 2009 by Alain Anselm to undo several undesirable alterations performed over the course of the twentieth century.

We’ll listen to 3 sets of preludes and fugues, proceeding through the keys in order.

C sharp major

This prelude is reminiscent of the well-known C major prelude from Book I – a series of calm arpeggiated chords that travel through a path of harmonies leading to quite distant places. However, once it reaches the dominant (G sharp major), the piece suddenly shifts into a short fugato Allegro section in ternary rhythm to get us back home.

The fugue, in 3 parts, is on a very simple theme – just four eight notes on a broken arpeggio, originally ascending and, as early as with the entrance of the third voice, descending. It can also be heard frequently diminished, in sixteenth notes. Towards the end of the movement Bach forgets that he’s writing a fugue and shifts into a freeform fantasia, closing the piece with cascades of thirty-second notes. I like the “juicy” C# major chord at the end which reminds us that we have 6 sharps in the key signature!

C sharp minor

The slow, unwinding, heavily ornamented lines in the prelude, on a meter of 9/8, create a rocking, pensive mood. This prelude is notable for maintaining a strict 3-part polyphony. The fugue, also in 3 parts and in a curious 12/16 meter, features an agile climbing theme, whose constant presence creates a sort of restless “perpetual motion”. A second subject appears halfway in, in chromatic eighth notes, in remarkable contrast to the main theme which makes it easy to spot.

D major

Befitting its bright, celebratory key, this prelude opens with a fanfare and arpeggios in triple meter which one can easily imagine as played by a trumpet. This call is answered by chords in double meter, which we can almost hear as the orchestra responding to the soloist. The fanfare and arpeggios get inverted in the second section. As we approach the end, the prelude is interrupted by a couple of bars of quick runs and harmonic uncertainty, before the theme re-emerges triumphant from the depths to a striking effect.

The fugue, in contrast, is severe and almost antiquated, with a theme of repeated notes that allows for an intricate and complex architecture in 4-parts.