Prelude, Fugue and Allegro in E-flat major, BWV 998
composition by Johann Sebastian Bach for lute or harpsichord
Prelude, Fugue, and Allegro in E♭ major, BWV 998, is a musical composition written by Johann Sebastian Bach for Lute or Harpsichord.
The piece was written around 1735. The original manuscript with the title "Prelude pour la Luth. ò Cembal. par J.S. Bach" was sold at Christie's on July 13, 2016, for £2,518,500.
Structure
Prelude
The Prelude is similar to many in The Well-Tempered Clavier (the second book of which dates from around the same time as this work), in that it is composed of many arpeggios. There is a pause in the motion when, just before the coda, there is a fermata over a third-inversion seventh chord with a rich suspension. There is a rare example of explicit consecutive fifths in the left-hand of bar 46.
Fugue
The Fugue is one of only three that Bach wrote in ternary form, with an exact repetition of its contrapuntally active opening section framing a texturally contrasting central section.
Allegro
The Allegro is a binary form dance with 16th notes.
“Prelude, Fugue and Allegro in E-flat major, BWV 998” enters the record as composition by Johann Sebastian Bach for lute or harpsichord. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Prelude, Fugue and Allegro can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6981946. VIAF identifies the subject as 189338186. The Library of Congress control number is n83014184. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1735 and 2016.
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This entry incorporates text from “Prelude, Fugue and Allegro in E-flat major, BWV 998” 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.