Minuet in G major (BWV Anh. 114)

Background

For most of the twentieth century this minuet was printed as a piece by Johann Sebastian Bach. It comes from the second notebook Bach gave his wife, Anna Magdalena, in 1725, a family album of keyboard pieces and songs copied out by several hands. Because nobody was sure who had composed it, it was catalogued in the appendix of Bach's works as BWV Anh. 114 ("Anh." stands for Anhang, appendix).

In the 1970s scholars identified the real composer: Christian Petzold, an organist at the court in Dresden, who had included this minuet and its partner in G minor in a harpsichord suite. The Bach family had simply copied two pieces they liked into the notebook.

The tune reached the pop charts in 1965, when the American group The Toys based their hit "A Lover's Concerto" on it, reworked into four beats to the bar.

How to practise it

This arrangement is the complete minuet: 32 bars in G major, in two halves. The right hand has a running tune of quarter and eighth notes; the left hand has a slower bass line, mostly long held notes and quarter notes.

Bar 1 lies under the hand: thumb on G, so A, B, C and D are 2, 3, 4 and 5. Bar 3 needs a shift. Play E with finger 3, then put the thumb on C, so D, E and F sharp are 2, 3 and 4 and finger 5 lands on the high G. Practise bars 2 to 4 slowly until the change is smooth. In bars 2 and 4, the jump down to the two low Gs is the same each time; look at it once, then do it by feel.

Learn the first half (bars 1 to 16) hands separately, then hands together, before starting the second half. The second half moves away from G major for a while (you will meet C sharps on the way to D major) before coming home.

A practice plan:

1. Right hand alone, bars 1 to 8, at 60 beats a minute. Keep the eighth notes even.
2. Left hand alone for the same bars, counting all three beats of every long note.
3. Hands together, two bars at a time, then four, then eight.
4. Raise the tempo through 80 and 96 to the full 116.

A minuet is a dance, and it should feel like one beat to the bar rather than three. Play the quarter notes slightly detached and the eighth notes smoothly, give the first beat of each bar a little more weight, and make the end of each eight-bar phrase sound finished. Its partner piece is the Minuet in G minor.

The minor keys and baroque minuet unit uses this piece as its main work.