Prelude in C

Bach finished the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier at Köthen in 1722 and wrote on the title page that it was for the profit and use of musical youth eager to learn, and for the amusement of those already skilled. It is twenty four preludes and twenty four fugues, one pair in every major and minor key, and this is the first bar of the first one. An earlier and shorter version of it is in the little keyboard book Bach wrote out for his eldest son Wilhelm Friedemann around 1720, which is as close as anybody gets to watching him think.

There is a bar in this prelude that Bach did not write. Around 1800 the Hamburg musician Christian Friedrich Gottlieb Schwencke inserted an extra measure after bar 22 to smooth a join he did not like, and because his edition was widely copied the extra bar spread into a great many prints. Editions still disagree: some run 35 bars and some 36. This page carries 35, which is what the sources going back to Bach have.

Charles Gounod hung a melody over the whole thing in 1853 and it became the Ave Maria that gets sung at weddings, which is why a piece with no tune in it is one of the most recognized things Bach wrote. There is no melody here at all. It is one arpeggio figure stated twice a bar, moving through a chord progression, and that is the whole design. What a player is practicing is the right hand, over a chord chart that happens to be by Bach.

On a mandolin the problem is range before it is anything else. The keyboard spans three octaves and a sixth and the neck spans three, so something has to be folded away. This setting moves the whole prelude up one octave, which puts most of it under the hand, then lifts the ten bass notes that still sit below the open G course. The other end is where the playing is: the top of the arpeggio climbs to the thirteenth fret and once to the fifteenth, so through the first third of the piece the hand sits up around the eighth or tenth fret for the figure and drops back for the bass at the bar line, and from bar 16 on the whole thing falls into first position. Four notes are still out of reach, the high A of bar 5, and that one bar turns over at the top instead of rising, which is where the mandolin ends and the keyboard keeps going. All 35 bars are here and nothing is cut. Play it slowly with strict alternate picking and let the repeated note in each bar ring, and the harmony underneath does the rest of the work.