Präludium und Fuge G-Dur für Gitarre opus 25

I love and admire the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. His preludes and fugues in particular are masterpieces in their own right, regardless of the instrument. Since the modern concert guitar was not designed until about 100 years after Bach's death by the Spaniard Antonio Torres, as a guitarist you are at a disadvantage compared to other musicians. There are no original compositions by Bach for the guitar, but there are for the lute. Bach wrote only two works explicitly for solo lute, five others are usually added.

Two reasons prompted me to compose the present composition: on the one hand, I wanted to try out whether I could compose a prelude and a fugue in Bach's style for the guitar; on the other hand, I wanted to deliver an original composition that would not require any editing or would first have to be rearranged.

In this prelude, the harmonic changes and modulation chains are executed with broken chords throughout, using various modulation techniques. The movement ends in the key of G major.

The main theme of the fugue consists of only four bars. It is astonishing what possibilities for change arise when one takes the compositional practices of the Baroque era as a basis. The following thematic changes are employed: Imitation, augmentation, inversion, mirroring, splitting off,

modulation and sequencing.

I hope that guitarists will have as much fun playing this work as I had playing the Invention of it.

Frank Knabben

Bochum, June 2015