Prelude & Fugue in G Minor

I especially love the meditative prelude. The section beginning at mm. 26 with repeated notes and chromatic harmony is extremely elegant and tasteful. The bass line is particularly well-written, and patterns like mm. 51-53 brings subtle drama. The entire piece is playable too!

Personally I think some reordering/transposing/rerun of the material here would give the piece better cohesiveness. The reappearance of the quaver-dominated opening material at mm. 15 for example can be in the dominant or relative key, and rerunning it again later (though maybe not in its entirety), particularly near the end brings not only unity but also some excellent contrast to the surrounding French overture rhythms.

5 hours ago, muchen_ said:

I especially love the meditative prelude. The section beginning at mm. 26 with repeated notes and chromatic harmony is extremely elegant and tasteful. The bass line is particularly well-written, and patterns like mm. 51-53 brings subtle drama. The entire piece is playable too!

Personally I think some reordering/transposing/rerun of the material here would give the piece better cohesiveness. The reappearance of the quaver-dominated opening material at mm. 15 for example can be in the dominant or relative key, and rerunning it again later (though maybe not in its entirety), particularly near the end brings not only unity but also some excellent contrast to the surrounding French overture rhythms.

 

Thank you so much for the thoughtful feedback.

Thanks for sharing this prelude and fugue, both of them a joy to listen to. The beginning of the prelude is especially very charming. However, the passage in m. 12 and 13 (and similar ones) with those notes of different length tied to semidemiquavers in both hands running in parallel seems difficult to play, especially to get the timing right, but I am a rather bad pianist.

After the cadence in m. 14/15, the verbatim repetition in m. 15-27 is not that unusual, but would have been easier to notate with a repeat sign. The following passage brings finally the modulation everyone is waiting for (you could try and modulate already in the first part of the prelude; it increases momentum as the prelude then has to find a way back) 😉 , and with it some harsh harmonies which you handle tastefully.

At the end, for a short moment it sounds like the opening phrase would come back in d minor, but in a clever move, we are disappointed; the return of g minor is, however, a bit too surprising for my taste; a e.g. "motivo di cadenza" or a similar adapted cadence could be used to flesh this more out.

The fugue has a good and versatile subject and I just identified three full instances of the subject (m. 65, m. 69, m. 73) and two partial ones (m. 77, m. 93); it would have been nice to have fewer instances of the sequences and more instances of the subject. But of course this is a well composed fugue, so this is more a matter of one's preferences.

Hi @Cafebabe,

I like the recurring March like turn figure in your prelude, it reminds of the D major fugue in WTC I. 

For the fugue, nice Dido and Aeneas like subject. If you are writing in Baroque style, usually the 3rd entry of the subject (in b.73) will be in tonic G minor instead of dominant D minor. I agree with @Willibald that there can be more appearances of the fugue subject, and to me especially there should be more appearances of the subject in the tonic G minor! Good counterpoint throughout though. Thx for sharing!

Henry