Prelude and Fugue in D minor, BWV 875
Keyboard composition by Johann Sebastian Bach
The Prelude and Fugue in D minor, BWV 875 is a keyboard composition written by Johann Sebastian Bach. It is the sixth prelude and fugue in the second book of The Well-Tempered Clavier, a series of 48 preludes and fugues by the composer.
Prelude
The prelude has 61 bars and is in 34. It is made up of running semiquavers and quavers. The piece was originally composed as a moto perpetuo, probably inspired by Antonio Vivaldi. The figuration is similar to that of a violin piece, particularly in an earlier revision of the prelude, Preambulum d-Moll, BWV 875a, which does not include the demisemiquavers in bars 22, 24, etc. in the final version. Despite this, the basic structure has remained the same: binary form, with the main theme restated in the dominant in bar 27.
Fugue
The fugue has 27 bars, is in common time and is in three voices. The subject's structure is similar to that of the theme of The Musical Offering, opening in triplet semiquavers moving diatonically then quavers moving chromatically.
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This entry incorporates text from “Prelude and Fugue in D minor, BWV 875” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.