Prelude and fugue

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 157.246.153.16 (talk) at 21:09, 11 January 2012 (I just changed the date in which book two of the Well Tempered Clavier was finished. According to the article on the Well Tempered Clavier it was 1942, not 1944.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

In classical music, many composers have written a set of preludes and fugues in most or all of the 24 major and minor keys. The use of this format is generally inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach's two books of preludes and fuguesThe Well-Tempered Clavier—completed in 1722 and 1742 respectively. Bach, however, was not the first to compose such a set: Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer wrote a 20-key cycle in his 1702 work Ariadne musica.

Works

The following works employ, sometimes loosely, the prelude-and-fugue format.

Composers of

The composers listed below, who lived and composed in the 19th and 20th centuries, employed this format.