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Piano sheet music for kids · Classical · Level 6: Moving on
Prelude in C
Free beginner piano sheet music: C major, 4/4, 9 bars. Press Play to hear it on a real piano, slow it down, or hear one hand at a time; click any note to start from there; print it for the music stand.
About this arrangement
The opening of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (1722): no tune at all, just a chord broken into a ripple, twice in every bar. After a quaver rest the right hand plays three notes, low to high, twice (G C E, G C E); the left hand lays down the two notes underneath, a quaver on the bass note and then a held inner note. Here are Bach’s first seven bars: the right hand exactly as he wrote it, and his two left-hand notes played one after the other instead of the bass being held; then the opening bar once more to come home, and a final held chord. The hand shape changes every bar, and bar 6 has an F sharp, so find each new chord before you play it.
Practice tip: Play each bar as a block chord first, both hands together, to learn the shapes; then break them up. Keep the semiquavers soft and even, and let the left hand’s held note ring under the ripple.
A short history
The Prelude in C major, BWV 846, opens the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier, which Bach finished in 1722 while he was Kapellmeister at Cöthen: twenty-four preludes and fugues, one in every major and minor key, to show that a keyboard tuned so that all the keys were usable could play in all of them. A shorter early version appears in the little keyboard book Bach began in 1720 for his eldest son Wilhelm Friedemann.
The prelude has no melody; it is thirty-five bars of the same broken-chord figure over slowly shifting harmonies. In 1853 Charles Gounod laid a new melody over it, which became his famous “Ave Maria”. Nineteenth-century editions often printed an extra bar after bar 22, added by the copyist Christian Friedrich Gottlieb Schwencke, and the “Schwencke measure” survived in print for decades before editors removed it.
It is now among the first Bach pieces most pianists learn.
Quick facts
- Tune
- Johann Sebastian Bach, 1722
- Key
- C major
- Time signature
- 4/4
- Length
- 9 bars
- Tempo
- Flowing, crotchet = 72
- Difficulty
- Level 6: Moving on (piece 187 of 201)
- Type
- Classical
- Hands
- Both: melody in the right hand, chords in the left
- Copyright
- Public domain tune; arrangement by Digital Greenhouse, free for personal and classroom use
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