Minuet in G

The melody lives in the Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach of 1725, and for two centuries it was taken to be Bach's own, cataloged as BWV Anhang 114. In the 1970s the scholarship caught up with it. The piece is by Christian Petzold, an organist at the Sophienkirche in Dresden, and it reached the notebook the way most of that book's contents did. The notebook was a family album of music the Bachs liked and played, not a register of what Bach wrote, so a piece sitting in it says nothing about who wrote it. Plenty of sheet music still prints the old attribution, which is why the correction needs stating here.

Whoever wrote it, it went everywhere. Almost every piano student meets it in their first year or two, which makes it one of the most played pieces of the eighteenth century by a long way. It has had a second life outside the practice room too. In 1965 The Toys built "A Lover's Concerto" on this melody and took it into the pop charts on both sides of the Atlantic.

On a mandolin it needs nothing done to it. The mandolin is tuned like a violin, so the tune sits in its home register exactly as written, with no transposition and no octave shuffling. The first half is all steps and small skips. Every phrase opens on the D on the fourth line of the staff, dips down to G and climbs back up again, and the hand stays put the whole way. It is built as a question and an answer. The first eight bars hang on a held A, a half cadence with the door left open, and the answering eight come home to G. The bar shape gives it the courtly lilt: a quarter note on the downbeat and then a run of eighths, over and over, so the first beat lands and the rest of the bar hurries after it.

The second half is where the work is. The C sharps live here, three of them written in, the accidental that tips the tune toward D and then toward A. This is also where the one real reach happens, the high B on the E string at the seventh fret in the opening phrase. Everything else sits in first position, so that B is one stretch to plan for and not a shift to learn. Both halves close the same way, on a G held for a full bar, and both repeat plainly with no first and second endings to track.