The Well-Tempered Clavier and Köthen: Courtly Freedom, Keyboard Practice and Craft

In 1722, in the small princely town of Köthen, Johann Sebastian Bach wrote out a title page for a collection of keyboard music. It promised preludes and fugues “through all the tones and semitones”, written “for the profit and use of the studious musical young” and for “the special diversion of those who are already skilful in this study”. The collection was the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier, and it has been at the centre of keyboard playing ever since. It is worth asking why it was written where it was: at a Calvinist court with almost no church music, under a prince who played himself, by a father teaching his own children. Köthen is one of the last stops on our Bach: The Man, His Music small group tour, with a walking tour of the castle and the church where Bach worshipped.

A title page as a manifesto

The collection’s plan is simple to state and was remarkable for its time. There are twenty-four preludes and fugues, each pair in a different key, rising step by step from C major and C minor through every major and minor key to B minor. A prelude, usually freer in form, sets up each key, and a fugue, in which a short theme is taken up voice by voice and worked out in strict counterpoint, follows it.

Bach was not the first to collect keyboard pieces across many keys. Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer’s Ariadne musica, published in 1702, contains twenty preludes and fugues in ten major and nine minor keys plus the Phrygian mode, and Bach knew it well enough to borrow some of its themes. What set Bach apart was completeness, all twenty-four keys, and ambition. His title page addresses two readers at once: the student learning to play and the accomplished musician who wants something to think about. Both readings still hold.

Was The Well-Tempered Clavier written for equal temperament?

Probably not, though nobody knows exactly what Bach used. For much of the twentieth century, scholars assumed “well-tempered” meant equal temperament, the modern tuning in which every semitone is the same size. Most specialists now think Bach meant one of the unequal “well temperaments” of his own time, but which one is still argued over.

The problem these tunings solved is old. The common keyboard tuning before about 1650, quarter-comma meantone, made major thirds beautifully pure but piled all its error into one interval, between G sharp and E flat. That interval was so sour it was called the “wolf”, and it made keys with many sharps or flats unusable. In the 1680s the organist and theorist Andreas Werckmeister described tunings that brought the keyboard “into the form of a circle”, spreading the error so that every key could be played. Unlike equal temperament, these well temperaments left each key with its own character, since the thirds in remote keys were less pure than in common ones. In 2005 the harpsichordist Bradley Lehman proposed that a looped drawing across the top of Bach’s title page encodes his tuning. Other scholars found the idea ingenious but unproven, and the debate goes on.

A court with time for keyboard music

Bach came to Köthen in 1717 as Kapellmeister, director of music, to Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen. Leopold, then in his early twenties, had learned harpsichord and violin on his grand tour and played string instruments, especially the viola da gamba. In 1714 he founded a court orchestra, and many of its players came from Berlin, where the Prussian royal orchestra had just been dissolved. Bach therefore found himself with skilled colleagues and an employer who understood what they did.

The court was Reformed, or Calvinist, and its worship used only simple music. For Bach, who had spent his Weimar years writing much of his organ music and his first regular church cantatas, as our article on Bach’s organ music in Weimar describes, Köthen meant a sharp change of direction. With little church music to supply, he wrote for the prince’s chamber and for the keyboard. The same years produced the six concertos Bach dedicated in 1721 to the Margrave of Brandenburg, explored in our companion article on the Brandenburg Concertos and the Köthen court, and the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier.

Teaching at home

The collection grew partly out of teaching in Bach’s own household. In 1720 he began a little keyboard book for his eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann, then about nine, the Klavierbüchlein für Wilhelm Friedemann Bach. Among its exercises and short pieces are early versions of eleven of the preludes that would later appear in The Well-Tempered Clavier. Friedemann went on to become one of the finest organists of his generation.

That origin explains much about the music. Many of the preludes are built on a single pattern sustained through the piece, the sort of figure a student practises until it becomes second nature. The famous C major prelude that opens the book is one long series of broken chords, simple enough for a child and rich enough that Charles Gounod later wrote his “Ave Maria” over it. As the title page suggests, Bach’s students learned from real music rather than dry exercises.

Which keyboard is the “Clavier”?

In Bach’s time the word did not mean one instrument. “Clavier” covered any keyboard of the day: the harpsichord, whose strings are plucked; the clavichord, whose strings are struck by small brass blades and which can shade its tone under the fingers; and even the organ. It did not include the pianoforte, newly invented in Italy and not yet part of German musical life. The collection was written to work on whatever keyboard a player had to hand.

That flexibility was part of the point. Bach’s first biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, reported that Bach tuned his own harpsichords and clavichords and was never satisfied with anyone else’s tuning, and that his method let him play in every key and move between distant keys without listeners noticing anything amiss. A collection running through all twenty-four keys was, among other things, a demonstration of what a well-tuned instrument could do. Today most people hear it on the modern piano, and in the nineteenth century the conductor Hans von Bülow called it the “Old Testament” of music, with Beethoven’s piano sonatas as the “New”.

Book II: a Leipzig sequel

The second book belongs to Bach’s later Leipzig years. Compiled around 1742, it survives in a manuscript now in the British Library in London, written out between 1739 and 1742 by Bach, Anna Magdalena and Wilhelm Friedemann together, a family enterprise like the first book’s origins in the schoolroom. A further copy of 1744, made mainly by Bach’s pupil and later son-in-law Johann Christoph Altnickol and corrected by Bach, became the basis of the great nineteenth-century collected edition. Taken together, the two books span more than twenty years of Bach’s working life, from the Köthen court to the Leipzig cantorate.

Copied by hand for eighty years

Bach never published either book of The Well-Tempered Clavier. Both spread among musicians in handwritten copies. Students copied them out as part of learning them, and copies passed from teacher to pupil across Germany and beyond. The first printed editions did not appear until 1801, fifty-one years after Bach’s death, from publishers in Bonn, Leipzig and Zurich.

That hand-to-hand circulation reached remarkable people. Mozart studied the fugues closely, arranged several for string ensemble and showed their influence in his own keyboard writing. Beethoven could play the whole work by the age of eleven. In 1835 Chopin began his own 24 Preludes, one in every key, in direct tribute. For a collection never printed in Bach’s lifetime, it had an extraordinary reach.

Köthen in Bach’s life

Köthen was also where Bach’s private life was turned upside down. In July 1720 he returned from travelling with the prince to find that his wife, Maria Barbara, had died and been buried in his absence. She lies in Köthen. On 3 December 1721 he married the young soprano Anna Magdalena Wilcke, and the wedding took place in the town. Prince Leopold stood godfather to their son, Leopold Augustus, who died in infancy.

The court changed too. Leopold married his cousin, Frederica Henriette of Anhalt-Bernburg, on 11 December 1721, eight days after Bach’s own wedding, and the court orchestra was reduced. That reduction was the main reason Bach left for Leipzig in 1723, though he kept the title of Köthen court Kapellmeister. Leopold died of smallpox in 1728, and the next year Bach returned to direct the funeral music; its text survives but the music is lost. Our overview of Bach’s Germany shows how the Köthen years fit between the court at Weimar and the civic post in Leipzig.

What can you see of Bach in Köthen today?

Two places, the castle and the church of St Agnus. Köthen Castle grew from a medieval island fortress, burned in 1547, was rebuilt as a palace in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and had its interiors redone in the neoclassical style between 1821 and 1833. Since 1997 its Ludwigsbau wing has housed the Historical Museum and Bach Memorial, on the first floor in the former apartments of the princesses. Its four themes are the gallery of rulers, the town and the Bach family in Bach’s time, his Köthen music, and Prince Leopold and the arts. An audio guide is available in English. Above it, the late-classicist Hall of Mirrors hosts the town’s Bach festival days, and the former riding hall was rebuilt as a concert hall in 2008.

St Agnus, a short walk away, was the Lutheran church in this Calvinist town. It was built by 1699 at the urging of Leopold’s Lutheran mother, Princess Gisela Agnes. Bach belonged to its congregation, occasionally played its organ, and his signature appears in its registers. The communion chalice from which he received Communion is still in use. The church also holds a Last Supper painted by Lucas Cranach the Younger in 1565.

How should a first-time listener approach The Well-Tempered Clavier?

A few pairs at a time, rather than straight through. Each book takes around two hours to play complete, and the pieces were written to be learned and played one by one, not heard as a single concert. Start with the C major prelude and fugue that opens Book I, then try the C minor and D major pairs to hear how much a change of key alters the mood. Recordings on harpsichord, clavichord and modern piano all have strong advocates, and comparing one pair across instruments shows how open the music is to interpretation.

How demanding is the visit to Köthen?

The Köthen visit is a guided walking tour of the town centre, including the castle and St Agnus, on a long travel day that begins in Weimar and ends with the drive on to Halberstadt for the night. The walking is moderate, mostly on paved streets and cobbles, but the day is a full one. The tour as a whole is rated Level 2 (Moderate), with three to five hours of activity on most days.

Köthen and the craft of the keyboard

It is easy to imagine The Well-Tempered Clavier as abstract, a set of perfect forms with no particular home. Köthen gives it one. A prince who played, a court orchestra with time for chamber music, a church that asked little of its music director, and a household full of children learning to play: those conditions explain why a church musician produced, in these six years, some of the most influential instrumental music ever written.

Standing in the castle where Bach worked, or in the church where he took Communion, it is worth remembering that the first readers of this music were students. Three centuries on, pianists still begin with the C major prelude, and the collection still serves both the readers its title page named: the young learning their craft and the skilled looking for something to think about.