Bach (arr. Mozart) Fugue in Eb major from the Well-tempered Clavier, BWV 876 – K 405/2

1782 was a particularly eventful year for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.  At 25 years old he found himself regarded as the foremost keyboard player in Vienna and increasingly in demand as a composer; his opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail was premiered in July of that year.  In August he married his wife Costanze.  In order to hone his skills as a composer Mozart immersed himself in the study of the works of J.S. Bach, including the Well-Tempered Clavier.  Luckily he had befriended the Baron Gottfried Bernhard van Swieten who had obtained prints and copies of various works of Händel and Bach during his tenure as Imperial Ambassador in Berlin.  In a letter that Mozart wrote to his father Leopold on 10 April 1782 he describes one of his Sunday study sessions:

“…Every Sunday at 12 o’clock I go to Baron van Suiten – and there we play nothing but Händl [sic] and Bach. – I am just building up a collection of Bach fugues – by Sebastian as well as by Emanuel and Friedemann Bach… after I had played them with him, Baron van Suiten has allowed me to take home with me all the works of Händl and J.S. Bach…”

Bach composed the Preludes and Fugues in the two books of the Well Tempered Clavier over the course of a few decades; Book I was compiled in 1722 in Cöthen and Book II in 1742 in Leipzig.  Much of the material served as pedagogical materials for Bach’s sons, and since that time generations of keyboard players and composers have studied the WTC.  As Mozart looked to refine his skills in composing in the “learned” contrapuntal style he found his ideal teachers in Bach and Händel.  The fact that he was also studying Joseph Haydn’s Op. 33 String Quartets and their “new and special style” balancing the popular and learned styles shows that the K. 405 arrangements of five fugues from Book II of the WTC for string quartet probably played a role in teaching Mozart how to integrate contrapuntal writing into the set of quartets he writes between 1782-1785 that he eventually dedicates to Haydn.

-Program notes by Dr. Daniel Doña