How Bach's First Invention May Have been Obscured By The Technology of His Time
Anyone who has taken piano lessons from a serious classical teacher has heard of and probably played Bach's Inventions. I know I did. I switched from a more jazz based piano teacher to classically trained pianist from my church. A few months later, after learning the First Invention, I decided to test my talent and audition to get into a prestigious local conservatory. When I played Busoni's edition of this invention, the classical teacher immediately got up and left. He came back with a manuscript of Bach's original writing, and a more edited version. When he played it I was shocked at how different it sounded. The next day I searched for at least an hour, trying to find a video or image of the sheet music with triplets, I was amazed, I only found one video among thousands. I decided to make this video to inform the world of how different Bach wanted his invention to sound.
I'm no musician, I don't know what triplets are, but the difference is enormous. Does this phenomenon affect other "classical" music which is not reproduced the way it should?
That is a good point. I have never heard of it affecting it, but many composers probably did make changes that they didn't publish because it was too much of a hassle back then. I know composers change their work, I do it all the time. Good question.
Here’s a video of Leonard Bernstein showing the different sketches Beethoven made of his fifth symphony:
Hats off to you for posting this....I love Bach, especially Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring.....Truly a genius composer
Bach is my favorite!
It sounds so much better with all of those triplets! Is there a place online where one can download Bach's handwritten version?
I wrote the music on a program called noteflight, as far as I could read his handwriting. The music is about as far as it was legible to me. Here is the link to the music as I copied it: https://www.noteflight.com/scores/view/c48aafff1d5244fbbb9f35591852d0e3ea043676
Here are the links to the original handwriting.
Thanks!
Oh, and remember, that's not the treble clef on the top. Transpose it down three steps to get C on the treble clef.
YouTube Video Containing full performance and music:
Ok. It is kind of hard to read.
yeah, I mentioned, I read as far as I could :)
Bach's version sounds much harder to play, maybe Busoni released the invention to the public as a simplified version on purpose?
That is a very good point, I never thought of that. I would say that Busoni wouldn't care, but the Inventions were written as student pieces, so that is a fair point.