Because its fugue is incomplete, J.S. Bach's Fantasia and Fugue for keyboard in C minor, BWV 906, a work composed sometime during the composer's early or middle Leipzig years (though possibly as late as 1738), is sometimes known simply as the Fantasia in C minor; it is one of relatively few Bach harpsichord prelude and fugue pieces whose authenticity has not been questioned, for it survives in an autograph manuscript. It is the latest, by a good measure (five or ten years), of Bach's individual prelude/fantasia and fugue pieces, and both the musical gestures and the style of keyboard writing with which Bach fills it are correspondingly advanced.

The fantasia is a clear-cut binary-form piece (the second half begins exactly as the first, but in the dominant key) in which the left hand jumps up above the right several times in much the same manner as it does in the keyboard pieces of C.P.E. Bach or even Mozart. The whole of this arpeggio-filled fantasia, whose every motion is made from either the opening descending arpeggio of the right hand or the consequent rising triplets of the left (both frequently turned upside down and the latter often strung out into strands of slippery chromatic imitation), seems on the very brink of leaving the Baroque behind, texturally speaking.

The fugue is in three voices and takes up a chromatically rising eighth-note subject. Just 47 bars and a downbeat survive (that downbeat being an arrival at the submediant key of A flat major); but the clever modern editors of the Neue Bach Ausgabe have managed to concoct a two-measure continuation that makes a transition back to a point near the beginning of the fugue and thereby transforms the piece into a da capo fugue with a makeshift ending at bar 34.

© All Music Guide

Portions of Content Provided by All Music Guide.
© 2008 All Media Guide, LLC. All Music Guide is a registered trademark of All Media Guide, LLC.