List of transcriptions of compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach
Encyclopedia
Johann Sebastian Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer, organist, harpsichordist, violist, and violinist whose sacred and secular works for choir, orchestra, and solo instruments drew together the strands of the Baroque period and brought it to its ultimate maturity...

’s music has often been transcribed
Transcription (music)
In music, transcription can mean notating a piece or a sound which was previously unnotated, as, for example, an improvised jazz solo. Further examples include ethnomusicological notation of oral traditions of folk music, such as Béla Bartók's and Ralph Vaughan Williams' collections of the national...

 for other instruments.

Bach's lifetime

  • Bach himself was an inveterate transcriber of his works for other musical forces. For examples, consult the following articles:
    • Sonatas and partitas for solo violin
    • Violin Concerto in A minor (Bach)
      Violin Concerto in A minor (Bach)
      The Violin Concerto in A minor, BWV 1041, was composed by Johann Sebastian Bach in 1748.-Structure and analysis:The piece has three movements:#Allegro moderato#Andante — with an ostinato style theme#Allegro assai...

    • Violin Concerto in E major (Bach)
      Violin Concerto in E major (Bach)
      The Violin Concerto in E major, BWV 1042, by Johann Sebastian Bach is a concerto for violin, strings and continuo in 3 movements:#Allegro with ritornello, with an overall structure like that of a da capo aria.#Adagio with an ground bass....

    • Double Violin Concerto (Bach)
      Double Violin Concerto (Bach)
      The Concerto for 2 Violins, Strings and Continuo in D Minor, BWV 1043, also known as the Double Violin Concerto or "Bach Double", is perhaps one of the most famous works by J. S. Bach and considered among the best examples of the work of the late Baroque period. Bach wrote it between 1730 and 1731...

    • Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565
      Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565
      The Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565, is a piece of organ music attributed to Johann Sebastian Bach. It is one of the most famous works in the organ repertoire, and has been used in a variety of popular media ranging from film, video games, to rock music, and ringtones...


Classical era

  • Working at the behest of Gottfried van Swieten
    Gottfried van Swieten
    Gottfried, Freiherr van Swieten was a diplomat, librarian, and government official who served the Austrian Empire during the 18th century...

    , Mozart
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , baptismal name Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart , was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music...

     arranged some of the fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier for string trio.

Romantic era

  • Ferruccio Busoni
    Ferruccio Busoni
    Ferruccio Busoni was an Italian composer, pianist, editor, writer, piano and composition teacher, and conductor.-Biography:...

     made a piano transcription of the chaconne from the Violin Partita in D minor, as did Brahms and others.
  • Ave Maria
    Ave Maria (Gounod)
    The Bach/Gounod Ave Maria is a popular and much-recorded setting of the Latin text Ave Maria.Written by French Romantic composer Charles Gounod in 1859, his Ave Maria consists of a melody superimposed over the Prelude No. 1 in C major, BWV 846, from Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier, written by...

    by Charles Gounod
    Charles Gounod
    Charles-François Gounod was a French composer, known for his Ave Maria as well as his operas Faust and Roméo et Juliette.-Biography:...

     is based on the first prelude of the Well-Tempered Clavier.
  • Romantic
    Romantic music
    Romantic music or music in the Romantic Period is a musicological and artistic term referring to a particular period, theory, compositional practice, and canon in Western music history, from 1810 to 1900....

     guitarist Tárrega
    Francisco Tárrega
    Francisco de Asís Tárrega y Eixea was an influential Spanish composer and guitarist of the Romantic period.-Biography:Tárrega was born on 21 November 1852, in Vila-real, Castelló, Spain...

     transcribed a variety of Bach works, including his Fugue
    Fugue
    In music, a fugue is a compositional technique in two or more voices, built on a subject that is introduced at the beginning in imitation and recurs frequently in the course of the composition....

     from Violin Sonata No. 1.
  • Liszt
    Liszt
    Liszt is a Hungarian surname. Notable persons with that surname include:* Franz Liszt , Hungarian composer and pianist* Adam Liszt , father of Franz Liszt* Anna Liszt , mother of Franz Liszt...

     arranged Prelude and Fugue in A minor, BWV 543
    Prelude and Fugue in A minor, BWV 543
    "The Great" Prelude and Fugue in A minor, BWV 543 is a piece of organ music written by Johann Sebastian Bach sometime around his years as court organist to the Duke of Saxe-Weimar . It is the final incarnation of Bach's harpsichord Fugue in A minor, BWV 944, written in 1708...

    , Prelude and Fugue in B minor, BWV 544, Prelude and Fugue in C major, BWV 545, Prelude and Fugue in C minor, BWV 546, Prelude and Fugue in C major, BWV 547, Prelude and Fugue in E minor, BWV 548, Great Fantasia and Fugue in G minor, BWV 542
    Great Fantasia and Fugue in G minor, BWV 542
    The Great Fantasia and Fugue in G minor, BWV 542, is an organ prelude and fugue by Johann Sebastian Bach. It acquired that name to distinguish it from the earlier Little Fugue in G minor, which is shorter...

    , and the melody of Movement 2 of Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, BWV 12 (also the same as the Crucifixus from the Mass in B minor BWV 232) for piano, and Movement 3 of the Violin Sonata in C minor, BWV 1017, the same theme mentioned above from Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, BWV 12, the Introduction and Fugue from Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis, BWV 21, and the Andante from Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir, BWV 38 for Organ or Harmonium.
  • Edward MacDowell
    Edward MacDowell
    Edward Alexander MacDowell was an American composer and pianist of the Romantic period. He was best known for his second piano concerto and his piano suites "Woodland Sketches", "Sea Pieces", and "New England Idylls". "Woodland Sketches" includes his most popular short piece, "To a Wild Rose"...

     (1860-1908) produced "Six Little Pieces after sketches by J. S. Bach" (1890) for piano solo.

20th century and later

  • Sergei Rachmaninoff
    Sergei Rachmaninoff
    Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor. Rachmaninoff is widely considered one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, one of the last great representatives of Romanticism in Russian classical music...

     made a transcription of the violin partita in E major, BWV 1006, including the following movements: prelude, gavotte and gigue.
  • Leopold Stokowski
    Leopold Stokowski
    Leopold Anthony Stokowski was a British-born, naturalised American orchestral conductor, well known for his free-hand performing style that spurned the traditional baton and for obtaining a characteristically sumptuous sound from many of the great orchestras he conducted.In America, Stokowski...

     made a large number of transcriptions for full orchestra, including the Toccata and Fugue in D minor
    Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565
    The Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565, is a piece of organ music attributed to Johann Sebastian Bach. It is one of the most famous works in the organ repertoire, and has been used in a variety of popular media ranging from film, video games, to rock music, and ringtones...

     for organ, which appeared in the movie Fantasia
    Fantasia (film)
    Fantasia is a 1940 American animated film produced by Walt Disney and released by Walt Disney Productions. The third feature in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series, the film consists of eight animated segments set to pieces of classical music conducted by Leopold Stokowski, seven of which are...

  • Alexander Siloti
    Alexander Siloti
    Alexander Ilyich Siloti was a Russian pianist, conductor and composer. Alexander Ilyich Siloti (also Ziloti, , Aleksandr Iljič Ziloti) (9 October 1863, near Kharkiv - 8 December 1945, New York) was a Russian pianist, conductor and composer. Alexander Ilyich Siloti (also Ziloti, , Aleksandr Iljič...

     made many piano transcriptions of Bach, most famously his Prelude in B minor
    Prelude in B minor (J. S. Bach, arranged Siloti)
    The Prelude in B minor is an arrangement for piano by Alexander Siloti of the Prelude in E minor BWV 855a by Johann Sebastian Bach from his Klavierbüchlein für Wilhelm Friedemann Bach...

     based on Bach's Prelude in E minor BWV 855a.
  • Andrés Segovia
    Andrés Segovia
    Andrés Torres Segovia, 1st Marquis of Salobreña , known as Andrés Segovia, was a virtuoso Spanish classical guitarist from Linares, Jaén, Andalucia, Spain...

     was famous for his playing arrangements of Bach works transcribed for classical guitar
    Classical guitar
    The classical guitar is a 6-stringed plucked string instrument from the family of instruments called chordophones...

    , such as his very difficult Chaconne
    Chaconne
    A chaconne ; is a type of musical composition popular in the baroque era when it was much used as a vehicle for variation on a repeated short harmonic progression, often involving a fairly short repetitive bass-line which offered a compositional outline for variation, decoration, figuration and...

     from the Violin Partita in D minor.
  • Schoenberg
    Arnold Schoenberg
    Arnold Schoenberg was an Austrian composer, associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School...

     arranged for orchestra Bach's St Anne organ prelude and fugue in Eb major
  • Webern
    Anton Webern
    Anton Webern was an Austrian composer and conductor. He was a member of the Second Viennese School. As a student and significant follower of Arnold Schoenberg, he became one of the best-known exponents of the twelve-tone technique; in addition, his innovations regarding schematic organization of...

     arranged the ricercar
    Ricercar
    A ricercar is a type of late Renaissance and mostly early Baroque instrumental composition. The term means to search out, and many ricercars serve a preludial function to "search out" the key or mode of a following piece...

     from The Musical Offering
    The Musical Offering
    The Musical Offering , BWV 1079, is a collection of canons and fugues and other pieces of music by Johann Sebastian Bach, all based on a single musical theme given to him by Frederick II of Prussia , to whom they are dedicated...

    for orchestra.
  • The Modern Jazz Quartet
    Modern Jazz Quartet
    The Modern Jazz Quartet was established in 1952 by Milt Jackson , John Lewis , Percy Heath , and Kenny Clarke . Connie Kay replaced Clarke in 1955...

     frequently performed compositions of Bach as transcribed for the instruments of their ensemble.
  • Violinists interested in historically informed performance
    Historically informed performance
    Historically informed performance is an approach in the performance of music and theater. Within this approach, the performance adheres to state-of-the-art knowledge of the aesthetic criteria of the period in which the music or theatre work was conceived...

    , notably Andrew Manze
    Andrew Manze
    Andrew Manze is an English violinist and conductor.As a guest conductor Manze has regular relationships with a number of leading international orchestras including the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Munich Philharmonic, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra,...

    , have created "anti-transcriptions"; that is, reconstructed hypothetical original versions for violin, of the Toccata and Fugue in D minor
    Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565
    The Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565, is a piece of organ music attributed to Johann Sebastian Bach. It is one of the most famous works in the organ repertoire, and has been used in a variety of popular media ranging from film, video games, to rock music, and ringtones...

    for organ.
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