A complete recording on the clavichord

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This recording of The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I forms the first part of a two-volume project, completed with the companion recording of Book II. Together, the two books comprise Bach’s monumental exploration of all twenty-four keys — forty-eight preludes and fugues that stand at the very heart of the keyboard repertoire. Heard side by side, the two volumes reveal not only the scope of Bach’s design, but also the subtle differences in character between the earlier and the later book.

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With Book I, Johann Sebastian Bach laid the foundations of a work that would come to define the possibilities of keyboard music. Conceived as a systematic exploration of tonal space, the cycle is at once pedagogical, experimental, and deeply expressive — a work written not for abstraction, but for the act of playing.

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In 1802, Bach’s first biographer Johann Nikolaus Forkel famously wrote that the composer ‘preferred to play the clavichord’. Based on extensive correspondence with Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, this observation points to the exceptional status the clavichord held in the eighteenth century — an instrument valued not for projection, but for refinement, control, and intimacy. Yet in the twentieth century, this most sensitive of keyboard instruments was largely eclipsed by the harpsichord and, later, the fortepiano in performances of Bach’s music.

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Looking back, this development is understandable. For a long time, newly built clavichords were often unable to sustain the technical and musical demands of Bach’s great oeuvre. As a result, conservatoires focused almost exclusively on the harpsichord, while Bach’s favourite instrument remained marginal — not because of its limitations, but because of the lack of suitable instruments.

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This situation has begun to change. The clavichords built by Joris Potvlieghe have played a decisive role in the modern revival of the instrument. They offer a compelling answer to the question of why Bach would have regarded this type of keyboard so highly: the direct contact between finger and sound, and the virtually infinite range of expressive nuance that follows from it. Few instruments allow such precise control over articulation, timing, and inflection.

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This recording of Book I was made on a clavichord by Joris Potvlieghe (2009), tuned in Werckmeister’s wohl temperierte Harmonia (1707), at a pitch of approximately a’ = 400 Hz. These parameters are not presented as historical curiosities, but as practical conditions that allow the music to speak with clarity and coherence. Tempos, articulation, and touch are guided by the instrument itself, encouraging a reading in which structure and expression are inseparable.

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Rather than treating The Well-Tempered Clavier as a monumental abstraction, this performance approaches each prelude and fugue as living musical discourse. The clavichord’s intimacy brings Bach’s writing into close focus, revealing its rhetorical shaping and internal balance. What emerges is not a reduced or private Bach, but a concentrated one.

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Hopefully, this recording will open up a part of this musical universe for the listener — as it did for the performer.

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