The Obsession of the Well-Tampered Clavier

Bach's Well-Tampered Clavier is all about an obsession. If it were a movie, the tagline would be "Discover the fetish of prelude & fugue!" Granted, there's a diversity of styles, especially in the preludes. But this is a work of an obsessive genius, who could have easily written yet another 48 pieces. In fact, it's almost sad that there's limit to the chromatic scale because unlike the Goldberg variations, the Well-Tampered Clavier doesn't have a direction. It's not meant to end. It's not about a singular journey. It's variations on a theme ad infinitum. The only reason it ends is that Bach runs out of keys! Yet the WTC is cohesive for this very same reason(the limit of keys), which smells like a paradox to me.

(Now, these toughts come to my mind as I listen the way Rosalyn Tureck drills the keys of her piano. It's not always pretty, but it's certainly obsessive.)

Maybe the form of the WTC is that of a fugue. A form that reinvents itself again and again, that looks at the same idea from different angles and prespectives...hopefully ad infinitum.