In summer 1950, Dmitri Shostakovich headed a Soviet delegation to Communist East Germany to attend events commemorating the bicentennial of the death of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750). Hearing the great cantor’s music in his hometown of Leipzig so moved Shostakovich that he decided to talk back to Bach. Soon after returning to Moscow, he began writing a cycle of 24 preludes and fugues inspired by his predecessor’s Well-Tempered Clavier. Bach took decades to complete his two sets of 12 pairs of preludes and fugues, but Shostakovich completed his 24 in only four months, from October 1950 to February 1951. 

Shostakovich never loses sight of the Bach model that inspired him, but his opus is not a work of imitation. Referring only obliquely to Bach, his intensely personal cycle moves around the circle of fifths (a diagram connecting all 12 keys through the sequence of intervals of perfect fifths) rather than in a stepwise progression up the keyboard. Also, each pair of prelude and fugue, performed without pause, is more closely linked thematically and harmonically than Bach’s. Shostakovich’s friend Tatiana Nikolayeva gave the premiere in Leningrad in December 1952. 

A distinctly modern sensibility informs the No. 15 set, in D-flat major—an odd pairing of the prelude’s “toy shop” waltz with a densely chromatic fugue that wanders into the realm of atonality and dodecaphony. Predictably, members of the Union of Soviet Composers denounced this set as “cacophonous”and “spasmatic,” an example of the “formalism” and “decadence” for which Shostakovich had frequently been criticized.  

The towering, rugged, and technically complex D-minor Prelude and Fugue (a double fugue with two subjects) that concludes the cycle overflows with subtle references to Shostakovich’s own music (for both orchestra and piano) and to Bach’s Art of the Fugue. Recognizable allusions to traditional Jewish music surface here and there, perhaps intended as concealed resistance in the prevailing environment of anti-Semitism. In the concluding measures, Shostakovich combines the tonalities of D major and D minor in a provocative modernist gesture of ambiguity, a question rather than an answer. —H.R.