Piano Forum

m1469, dears,

I try to ad something, in my handicapped English, on what well-tempered means in my opinion and on how Bach can sound in general.
First of all, 'well' is the translation of 'wohl', which has also a small connotation of 'whole'.  It has a sound of totalness.  The prelude in the well-tempered can be seen as an ode to the in that time new temperament in keyboards and is in fact something like an etude.  It tries to capture all the temperaments in every tune that the piano can offer in a two page score.  When you look at the original score it has a genuine, mathematical fluidity though at different measures there happens something magical for the ears and only the end is in my ears a little strange, forced, but that can be due to the fact that the original isn't also that clear. 
I have this childhood-memory of a respected pianotuner who once got critic from a musician that the piano wasn't welltuned.  The tuner was a blind man an the musician got this, in that period, brand new electronic tuningmachine that looked like a waterpass (something with a bubble in water that is used to see if surfaces are really flat.)  And the tuning machine showed at different spots a 'mistake'.  Told in a simplified way this is what happened. Every note can be divided in nine 'comma's'.  One can make a difference between chromatic and a diatonic "tones". Let's say chromatic is five comma's and diatonic is four comma's, that makes nine.  And for what's left between mi and fa, and si and do, the tuner did spread nicely a five comma's for the first and a four comma's for the other.  The electronic machine didn't make this difference but cut everything in two parts of 4,5.  That gives a flat sound to the whole tuning. The blind tuner didn't use such machine and had a human, temperamental tuning.  Once they artist realised that there was a recurrent 4 and 5 comma's, once he realised that the tuner did his job with his guts, his stomach, his 'temperament' the fight was over and he congratulated the tuner.
Now the creation of the keyboard, the division, the number of keys per scale is a purely human invention.  Music is of a cosmic order.  There has been tremendous discussion, conflict, mainly between religious, catholics and - let's call them - searchers over the (actual) division of the keyboard. It was a quarrel over numbers (of keys).  Some people thought music was sacred and therefor the propriety of the church.
I'll make it short.  The undescribable beautiful things that sometimes happen in pianomusic is in my opinion caused by temperament of player and instrument and the dynamics, the vibes, the trilling of chords or series of notes.  If both are magically balanced, then the emotion doesn't make a stop in the brains but it goes straight to the fibres of the listener's body, nerves, back, skin... (or the heart if you prefer.) The prelude of the well tempered is one of those pieces that contains this imminent beauty, within itself, and the pianist can - sometimes - bring a little of that beauty alive.