This is a book of commentaries on selected Bach fugues—
“essays in musical analysis and appreciation,” one might call
them, to enlarge on the title of Donald Francis Tovey’s famous
Essays in Musical Analysis. The fugues are keyboard fugues, written
for clavichord, harpsichord, and organ. About half of them
come from the two books of The Well-Tempered Clavier (WTC),
the other half from a variety of other sources, some of them less
familiar: Bach’s comprehensive keyboard publication Clavierübung
(Keyboard Practice), Die Kunst der Fuge (The Art of
Fugue), the English Suites, and other manuscript sources. The
music stems from all periods of Bach’s career except for the earliest.
The Chromatic Fantasy dates most probably from his
Weimar years, around 1715, and the two contrapuncti from The
Art of Fugue reached their definitive form when Bach revised the
work just before his death in 1750.