Bach’s ‘notebooks’ provide a fascinating glimpse into the domestic music academy of the Bach family home. They contain original compositions, exercises, and model examples by other composers, all collected with a view to providing a rounded musical education to family members. The Notebook for Wilhelm Friedemann Bach was compiled for Johann Sebastian’s eldest son, who himself went on to become one of the leading organists, improvisers and composers of his day. The book contains systematic exercises, first or early versions of three of Bach’s most important keyboard cycles (some of the preludes from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Preambulums for the Two-part Inventions and Fantasias for the Three-part Sinfonias) and suites by Richter, Telemann and Stölzel among other items.
This Urtext edition is presented in an attractive landscape format, inspired by the original layout of the Notebook, making it especially well-suited to the piano music stand. It presents cutting-edge scholarship from the world’s leading Bach authority Professor Christoph Wolff including the most up-to-date research regarding attributions of authors and writers, new fragments brought to light by recently rediscovered manuscripts and the latest dating of sources.