Besides being an important part of piano music literature, Johann Sebastian Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier has been a continuous influence on composers. Several of the great composers, including Mozart and Beethoven, secured their own personal copies for study purposes before the first publication of Bach’s collection of preludes and fugue. Not only this, but the Well-Tempered Clavier has often inspired other composers to undertake the composition of similar collections. For instance, Frederic Chopin wrote his own collection of 24 preludes for piano in each of the 24 major and minor keys. Chopin’s preludes, however, do not have accompanying fugues. Dmitri Shostakovich, on the other hand, did compose a set of 24 preludes and fugues.
After World War II, Shostokovich was Soviet Russia’s leading composer, despite the fact that he was in a general position of disfavor with the Soviet Communist Party. In 1950, Shostokovich was sent to Leipzig as Russia’s representative at the bicentennial festival of Bach’s death. As a part of this festival, he was asked to sit on the judging panel for the First International Bach Competition. On of the entrants was a 26-year-old girl from Moscow named Tatiana Nikolayeva had come to the festival prepared to play any of Bach’s 48 preludes and fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier on request. Needless to say, she won the gold medal.
Shostokovich was greatly inspired by the Nikolayeva’s playing and he returned to Moscow and set out on the composition of his own set of preludes and fugues. After the completion of each piece, he would invite Nikolayeva to his Moscow apartment for her to see the piece. At the collection’s completion, Shostokovich dedicated the work to Nikolayeva and she undertook the public premiere of the 24 preludes and fugues on December 23rd, 1952. The work was not received well in Soviet Russia. The dissonances of the fugues offended some of other composers, and the fugue was, in general, seen as too “Western” by the Soviet regime and therefore, too archaic. Despite this, Shostokovich’s 24 preludes an fugues have become a well-known collection of piano music.
Unlike the Well-Tempered Clavier in which the preludes and fugues are ordered in parallel major/minor pairs ascending chromatically from C major (C major, C minor, C sharp major, C sharp minor, etc.), Shostokovich adopted the same ordering as in Chopin’s 24 preludes, that is, relative major/minor pairs around the circle of fifths (C major, A minor, G major, E minor, etc.). Musical references, both to Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and Shostokovich’s own works, appear in several of the pieces.
