Luogo e data di registrazione		Haus Queekhoven, Breukelen (Holland) - 12/20 Febbraio 1964
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer		Wolf Erichson
	Engineer		Dieter Thomsen
	Prima Edizione LP		Telefunken "Das Alte Werk" | SAWT 9457-B (Stereo) - AWT 9457-C (Mono) | 1 LP - durata 47' 02" | (p) 1964 | ANA Telefunken "Meister der Musik" | SAWT 9457-B | 1 LP - durata 47' 02" | (p) 1964 | ANA | Riedizione
	Edizione CD		Teldec Classics | LC 6019 | 3984-21354-2 | 1 CD - durata 73' 43" | (c) 1998 | ADD
	Cover		"Johann Sebastian Bach", Ölgemälde von Elias Gottlieb Haussmann.
	Note		-

Bach's “inner biography”, his domestic and artistic “day to day existence”, are less known to us than the private lives of any other great composers of the modern age. And yet there are some works of his - by no means few in number - that are not very pretentious and therefore not very well known, but which, in their very modesty, are able to give us clear information about the composer's everyday life. These are the little practice pieces for the domestic use of the musical Bach family, the partly serious, partly gay songs and arias and the group of compositions written for special occasions or as favours, which include both the high-spirited Quodlibet and the little but highly complex instrumental canons of the later years. The wealth of forms and nuances that Bach was able to impart to these "little works", their cpmbination of naive charm, apparent casualness, intimacy of private domestic music-making or expert contemplation of little masterpieces of part-writing and strictest formation into the totality of a work of art that is only outwardly small and inconspicuous, are movingly and astonishingly manifested even in such a limited selection as can be accommodated of our record. The “Little” Preludes - altogether twenty have been preserved for us - probably all date from Bach's Köthen period (1717-23), and have partly come down to us in the Little Keyboard Book for Wilhelm Friedemann. They were thus intended as simple practice and study pieces for the prospective keyboard player and composer. In Bach's hands they have become real little works of art, meticulously formulated in spite of their outward modesty and each with its own clearly defined character of expression (quite apart from the fact that each prelude, faithful to its educational purpose, presents its own problems of fingering and articulation). The little Fugue in C major, BWV 952, almost certainly belongs to the same category; its authenticity, however, has not been completely established. Also belonging to the domestic circle of the Bach family are the songs which Bach himself and his second wife Anna Magdalena wrote down in the latter's second “Notenbuch" (1725), although these did not serve any didactic purpose. They are simple melodies with continuo accompaniment, which pour out their fervent and tender expression entirely from the intense melodic writing of the voice part, their harmony being kept strikingly simple. (The little “Aria’’ BWV 505 is taken from the Schemelli Song Book which was published in 1736, but is sure to have originated in the same mode of music making.) But the twenty-four-year-old wife of the Cantor of St. Thomas's felt by no means only at home in the world of contemplative family worship, as is shown by the “cosy” humour of the Tobacco Pipe Song, which also provides evidence of the fashion of "tobacco intoxication" which had taken a powerful hold of the middle classes in Bach's day. Bach’s humour finds an even more robust and unrestricted expression than in the above song in the fragmentary Wedding Quodlibet. The high-spirited text, in which lines from various sources are thrown together, abounds in vigorous jokes and allusions; the no less high-spirited music is full of folk song quotations and musical jests. The whole reflects the slightly alcoholic revelry of a proper wedding celebration among citizens of the baroque age, showing Bach the “Cantor” from a most unaccustomed but very amiable side. On the other hand, the instrumental canons which Bach wrote, mostly in the latter years at Leipzig, in family albums or dedicated to his friends and patrons on other occasions match more closely the traditional picture of the composer. The way in which the ageing master turned to profound musical speculation, demonstrated most maggnificently in the Art of Fugue and the Musical Offering, also appears here on a modest scale yet with skillful and profound results. The subtly constructed little works, which demand exact study and enjoyment of every detail, pass by almost too fleetingly as an aural experience. Also austere and earnest in character are finally the four-part chorales, which were first published after Bach's death by C.P.E. Bach and J.P. Kirnberger. In their accurate and subtle interpretation of the words and their magnificent wealth of harmony they stand, equal in quality, alongside the great chorale settings of the cantatas; like the latter, they combine the simple chorale melodies (those selected here all being by Bach himself except for BWV 434) in the soprano with a fine web of lower voices, the “voice of the congregation” with its individual interpretations, to form a profound symbolic unity. Turning to the purely instrumental field, we find this relationship finally prevailing in the early chorale arrangements for the organ as well, which were probably composed at Weimar (1708-1717). The three last pieces on our record - two of these instrumental chorale arrangements and one vocal treatment of the same chorale - clearly demonstrate the basic similarity as well as the subtle differences between these two different types of performance and tone within the same category.