Five Fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier, KV 405

About the work

In 1782, at Baron van Swieten's Sunday gatherings in Vienna, Mozart encountered manuscripts of Bach and Handel for the first time in any systematic way. He responded by arranging five fugues from Book II of the Well-Tempered Clavier for string quartet. The transcriptions add almost nothing: they simply hand the keyboard's four voices to four instruments. The exercise fed directly into his own contrapuntal writing thereafter.

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