Along with Beethoven's sonatas and the purely idiomatic works for piano of Chopin and Debussy, the solo keyboard music of Johann Sebastian Bach represents the heart of the pianist's repertory; in the more specialized field of music for the organ, Bach's primacy seems beyond challenge. This listener's guide to Bach's music for the keyboard provides the interested amateur with a close but non-technical look at these two crucial parts of the master's oeuvre. The composer's tendency to work exhaustively in tightly structured formats - such as the forty-eight preludes and fugues of "The Well-Tempered Clavier" - provides a natural framework for this study; but the power, beauty, high polish, and occasionally the sheer strangeness of Bach's imagination are carefully examined as well.
