I'm going to learn the eb/d# minor prelude and fugue from book 1 of Bach's WTC. The prelude I can handle, although it presents its own difficulties. Now, the fugue is something else.

How would you advise me to practise this from scratch? I've analysed it as I'm doing an academic degree and this was part of my course. From a performance perspective how can I take it apart and get my fingers 'round it?

Also, it ok to not sustain some of the notes of the inner voice at times? It's impossible to do it unless you have humongous hands.

I'd appreciate any help!

A nice one to look at, i always tackle the fugue by just playing each voice seperate frm the others over and over again so i know where they come in and can get the right fingering for them, and then slowly add the other voices, so the two top voices and the two bottom voices, and very slowly tackle it from the start then, although i think as long as you get the right fingering in place before you go off at speed, it is alot easier to handle.

Actually, you have already done the hard work.

You know where the voices enter. Later on, you know where the inversions\retrogrades etc are. You have decided which parts are more significant at any one given moment, and so which ones need making slightly prominent.

From here, all you have to do is work out bar-by-bar which fingers go where, and which ones require extra weight to convey the nuances you have spotted in the score.

Try not to be afraid of this; be confident; you really have already done the hard work.

I know I might be berated on here for doing it like this, but I actually do it the other way around; I learn simply the notes - where my fingers need to go - before I analyse the fugue and decide which voices should be prominent where, etc.

I then adjust my fingering accordingly to assist the different sounds that I am now trying to create and to make sure I can bring out the nuances in the score, which means going through the fugue in detail again. After this, I practice it as I would any other piece - voice by voice sometimes to know where they come in and how they should be played, othertimes bar by bar or from one inversion to another if that is relevant to the particular fugue.

I think the most important thing with fugues is to play it through and play around with how you want the theme to be played each time. In some ways, it needs to be the same each time it is heard, but of course it also demands to be different on one level in order to move with the piece to the climax so that it develops and doesn't stay flat.

Good Luck and have fun - I'm sure you will enjoy it, especially since you understand the form well enough to pick it apart. I think fugues are brilliant and so rewarding to play when you know what is going on within them; this allows you to play each fugue in so many different ways while still keeping the essence of the piece alive - Fugues have so much scope for interpretation!

I hope you will not be berated for this; it sounds like a good plan to me.

Some anyalyse the piece and then learn the notes.

Some learn the notes then analyse the piece.

There are even those who learn the notes, then the piece without ever analysing it.

There must be a fair few students who analyse a piece without ever learning to play it.

I am not sure it matters who does what, so long as the individual ends up gaining from the process.

You're not the only one!

Method A: The first (Prelude &) Fugue I ever learned was the E maj (no.9) from bk 1. I started with bar 1 and simply worked my way through over several months memorizing bar by bar until I could play the whole thing from memory. No analysis, no dynamics, no articulation, no voicing . . . no interest, no understanding, not much pleasure. I didn't learn another for nearly 30 years - and this time I had a teacher who taught me a better way (see below). I'm now on my 3rd & 4th simultaneously.

Method B: For a 4 part fugue, firstly make 4 copies of the score(s) and mark in highlighter pen on the top copy the "soparano" voice, on the second copy the "alto" voice and so on. (3 part fugue, only 3 copies and so on) Then double - underline each entry of the main theme and single underline the second theme. This entire process took me less than an hour last time and was time well invested.

Taking the scores (originals and copies) to the piano, for a week play one voice at a time, slowly and trying to get the right fingering (which is harder than it sounds as sometimes the right fingering makes no sense when only playing one voice). All 4 voices every time, just not together. This is the time to get articulation right as well - from the very start.

Once you are happy with all 4 voices separately, also play each combination of voices (SA, ST, SB, AT, AB, TB). This is not the same as hands separately as often voices, particularly the two inner voices, cross staves. Still slow and trying to bring out the entries of main theme and second theme. Odd fingerings start to make sense.

Then move on to hands separately (still slow), whilst still playing voices separately as well. Fingerings should be becoming secure at this stage - any difficult ones mark in pencil on the score.

Eventually, whilst still playing all 4 parts separately on a regular basis, start playing with hands together all 4 voices, VERY slowly making quite certain that each note is held for the right length with the right finger. Start with the last bar. Bring the tempo of that bar up slowly about half what you will be doing at the end. When that one bar is right, reliable and relatively secure (it takes me an hour or so, which is why my wife likes me using the digital with headphones) move forward to the penultimate bar and repeat the process, linking to the last bar. Work forwards through the piece.

Then start at the end again and you will discover that the final bar that was so secure has gone to pot, but now it only takes 10 minutes to get it up to scratch again. Don't play too fast and make quite sure of each notes duration, articulation and dynamic. This time when you get right through to bar 1 you should find that you can now play the piece right through for the first time without too many mistakes and at about half speed.

From now on it's a matter of bringing it up to speed whilst maintaining accuracy. Two main schools of thought on this and I recommend using a mixture of both: Firstly crank the speed up slowly with a metronome. Every new speed you will find some bits fall apart - go back and work them in isolation until they work at the new speed and then incorporate into the whole piece. The problem is that this is a bit like trying to walk faster and faster - eventually you have to break into a run so: Secondly, work out what speed you want it to be and just go for it. You might well find that large parts of the piece aren't a problem with this, or you might find it completely impossible, go back to method 1 for a while.

The result is a MUCH better performance, with much more interest and understanding, and therefore pleasure, in less than half the time. Sometimes (often) I can play it, or at least large parts of it, from memory, but who cares?

I start from a position of already knowing how they all sound, in several different interpretions. If I didn't have that background the first thing I would do is try to create an aural image by reading the score away from the keyboard. Then I would probably not be able to resist the temptation to listen to a recording or two.

The real work would then start by

1. Figuring out the phrasing I want to give it

2. Figuring out and marking in a suitable fingering that:

a. Serves the phrasing I have decided on
b. Is physically possible
c. Is not going to wreck my hands

I'll give the editor's fingering a fair trial. It is usually mostly OK, but always needs changing in several places. Occasionally it just does not work for me at all

3. Then I play the entire piece very slowly, hands together several(to many!) times, to establish the fingering and phrasing ( and make final corrections and alterations).

4. After that the hard work follows, of learning to make the contrapuntal lines clear. This uses many of the techniques the other contributors have described:

a. Playing each line separately
b. Playing all pair-wise combinations of voices
c. Singing one voice and playing the others

5. Also any especially tricky sections are isolated for detailed technical practice.

6. When it is fluent and I think getting ready for performance I record myself and make note of all the hesitations, unintentional speeding up and slowing down, rhythmic and dynamic irregularities and set to work on eliminating them.

This means a lot of work with the metronome, more careful listening, and re-recording frequently to check progress.

7. The final stage is to make sure that I can play it from memory (by now it will already be burned in, and only a bit of specific memory work is needed on hard-to-recall sections)

I find fugues (by any composer) by far the most difficult type of music to learn. More gifted musicians than me may be able to shorten this process and skip some steps.

EDIT: A simple answer to the original question is:

If you want to learn how to play a fugue then first learn how to write one!

I forgot to mention previously that I learned theory of how fugues are structured in classes in composition. If you don't have that background it is definitely worth making the effort to get it. You can learn most of what you need in just a few hours with a good text-book in one hand and a copy of the 48 in the other.

It is also useful to have studied counterpoint, and to be able to recognise harmonies and harmonic progressions. Again it is not difficult. It is surprising how much you can learn in a efw weeks with the help of a good textbook and a little time each day invested in practical exercises.

When you have some theoretical grounding and the basics of harmony and counterpoint then a good exercise is to take the theme from any Bach Fugue (preferably one that you don't know well) and write your own countersubject to it in double counterpoint.

From there you can go on to construct the whole exposition of a fugue, with more countersubjects, or additional free counterpoint. Eventually you might like to compose some episodes and even a stretto. You will constantly hit problems in avoiding ugly intervals and in modulating from key to key, as well as keeping the notes playable by normal-sized hands.

It does not matter how awful your first few attempts are (mine were, and still are, quite dire). What matters is that you will end up with enormous respect for Bach's musical craftsmanship and inventiveness, and a much deeper understanding of what a fugue is all about. And you will be able to play one a great deal better.

Just to add to my previous response, one thing that I find invaluable is to go through the piece and play the theme (or each theme if there is more than one) separately every time it come up.

So for example in the C Minor fugue in Book 1, the right hand goes - dadadat dat daa, dadadat dat daa, dadadat dat dadadaaa, dadadaa
then the right hand goes off and does something different while the left hand takes over that same theme, so I drop the right hand and only play the left hand, until the theme comes in again somewhere else, in which case I will drop all the other notes and play only where the theme is.

This helps (me at least) to see where the theme is and how it should sound in relation to the pieces. I like to make sure that there is something slightly different about the theme each time it is played to give it some development and interest.

This is really interesting and has made me spend a lot of time thinking about my own approach. It's not as clear cut as some, but

1. Sight read slowly through the notes.
2. Identify what each voice does and spend a little time learning each voice separately
3. Back to playing through the whole piece.
4. Time spent on each hand separately, finalising decisions on fingering etc.
5. Back to playing through again

In between all these stages I choose different aspects to focus on - dynamics, phrasing, etc...

The short answer would have been I jump around all the different areas that need attention, trying to make sure each time I play I focus on something different from the last time, so avoiding getting 'hung up' on any one issue.... This is the plan, obviously the reality is rarely so straightforward and sometimes it's just lovely to play without the self-inflicted pressure of a goal!

Interesting that this thread should have come up when it did: I answered this instead of starting my own. Despite having an approach to learning a fugue, nonetheless I find it a very difficult discipline. In many pieces of music there are large parts that are fairly easy, with the difficult bits as whatever the opposite of light relief is. In the fugues there are no easy phrases - not easy bars, not even easy notes. Admittedly there are gradations of difficulty but it is soooo hard to play a fugue (at least for me)!

And the rest of us, as well. Never mind; play a few and it will revolutionise your outlook on piano playing.

The study of a few Bach fugues gives us the ability to spot melodies within structures where we never believed such melodies existed. From there, we can go on to learn how to voice the different lines an a way that makes them audible to a listener.

Not sure what we would gain from playing all 48. You would have to ask Angela Hewitt or Andras Schiff about that, but I bet the insights would be fantastic.

Fame? Arthritis?

Brain pain?

Or an empty house....
Might be worth a try.

I have a question about invertible counterpoint. In the D# minior fugue (book 1) when the subject statement finishes, the countersubject begins on an open fifth; I thought this wasn't allowed?

I'm not an expert on this but I suspect the answer is that "the rules" aren't rules, they're guidelines: What I mean by that is that if you don't know "the rules" you can't write a fugue at all. Once you know "the rules" and can apply them you can then choose to bend or break them (sparingly and with care) for effect once in a while.

According to D.F.Tovey in my ABRSM edition, " this fugue is occupied entirely with its subject, direct and inverted, partially and wholly augmented, and combined in various stretti. There is no countersubject, and the episodes are mere undifferentiated breathing spaces between the stretti. There is thus no other theme to bring out besides the subject."

So you might well be right, but I can't remember for certain - its a long time since I studied the rights and wrongs of fugue!