Minuet in G minor (BWV Anh. 115)

Background

This minuet is the darker partner of the much more famous Minuet in G major. The two stand side by side in the notebook of keyboard music that Johann Sebastian Bach gave his wife Anna Magdalena in 1725, and for most of the twentieth century both were printed under Bach's name. Because nobody could be sure he wrote them, they were listed in the appendix of the Bach catalogue as BWV Anh. 114 and 115.

The puzzle was solved when both minuets turned up in a harpsichord suite by Christian Petzold (1677–1733), a respected organist and composer in Dresden, little of whose music survives.

In a Baroque suite, paired minuets were usually played first, second, then first again, which makes this one the thoughtful contrast in the middle.

How to practise it

This arrangement is the whole minuet: 32 bars in 3/4, in two halves of 16 bars. The key signature has two flats, B flat and E flat, and you will also meet F sharp, the note that pulls the music home to G at the cadences.

The tune starts high, on the B flat above the staff, and steps down. A comfortable fingering for bars 1 and 2 is 5, 4, 3 for B flat, A and G, then 4, 1, 1 for A, D and D. In bar 3 the hand drops an octave: thumb on the low G for the four eighth notes, then finger 5 on the long D in bar 4.

The first half ends in B flat major, a brighter key, and the second half travels further before coming back to G minor. Look out for B natural in the left hand in bars 12 and 13, and E natural in bars 17 and 19. Each is a signpost to a new key, so circle them in your music.

The hardest bar is 27, where the right hand plays two lines at once: a low G, F sharp and G underneath a falling D, C and B flat. Use the thumb for all three low notes and fingers 5, 4 and 3 for the high ones.

Practise bar 27 first as three pairs of notes played together (G with D, F sharp with C, G with B flat), then split the pairs again.

A plan: each hand alone for the first half at 60 beats a minute, counting every beat of the long notes; hands together four bars at a time; then the second half the same way, and finally the whole minuet at 80, 100 and the full 116. Listen to the left hand too: in the opening bars its long notes fall step by step from G to D, and that slow bass gives the dance its gravity.

This minuet features in the minor keys and baroque minuet unit.