Purely tuned or tempered - what's the difference? Or so the layman thinks, until he hears a 16th-century organ and gets to experience a light C major next to a pithy E-flat major, a heavenly A major next to a shadowed B minor. Each key sounds distinctly different - but what discords: A-flat major, F-sharp minor, C-sharp major - a torment to the ears, completely out of tune, unplayable! This organ is purely tuned and the price is a limited number of playable keys. Bold modulations over several stops required a new tuning model in the late 17th century, and Andreas Werckmeister had invented it in 1691.
"Tempered" means nothing more than that the semitones are all the same distance apart - but at the cost of making all intervals except the octave sound a tiny bit out of tune. The benefit of Werckmeister's new tuning: it was now possible to play in remote keys without the chords sounding sharp or wrong.
Composers were delighted; just two years later, Pachelbel uses 17 keys in his suite collections, J. K. F. Fischer spun the thread of the "Ariadne musica" through 19 major and minor keys in 1702, and Johann Mattheson presents basso continuo exercises in all 24 keys in his "Exemplarische Organistenprobe" of 1719. Bach was thus able to draw on models for his Well-Tempered Clavier of 1722, both in his handling of the entire range of keys and in the combination of prelude and fugue.
He was not the first, but also not the last, to make compositional use of the "Well-Tempered". Chopin already took up the idea with his 24 Préludes Op. 28, in the 20th century Rodion Shchedrin and Dmitri Shostakovich each wrote 24 Paludes, and in 1942 Paul Hindemith showed in his Ludus tonalis how to deal with this variety of keys in an original way.
All this will be shown in the concert by the students of the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Frankfurt, but much more, for countless are the adaptations that Bach's work has undergone. Mozart had already arranged several fugues for string quartet, saxophone ensembles, brass formations and jazz choirs find pleasure in the tricky counterpoint, and of course the epidemic Ave Maria may not be missing - a wonderful melody by Monsieur Gounod, to which Bach composed an accompaniment. There is much to discover.
Friendly support of the Deutsche Bank Foundation.
Alte Oper Frankfurt: https://www.alteoper.de/
Text source and further information about this event:https://www.alteoper.de/de/programm/veranstaltung.php?id=519979051
