Menuet in G

This is the most famous piece in the Anna Magdalena Bach Notebook, and for two centuries it was the most famous piece Bach did not write. He copied it into his wife's notebook in 1725. Scholarship now credits it to Christian Petzold, a composer and friend, a reminder of how much eighteenth-century music circulated anonymously through copying. The "Bach" label and the modest title have kept it in the beginner's book, and it belongs there. It consists of two balanced eight-bar phrases, one dancing line over a simple bass, and a mordent or two.

As a warm-up it offers almost nothing, but as a dance it teaches a steady three-four pulse, a melody voiced above its bass, and ornaments placed neatly and in time. It is the ideal first piece for hearing that a dance has a direction, and that even simple music repays curiosity about where it came from.

About this edition

Menuet in G major, BWV Anh. 114. Edition typeset by Pierre Gouin, Les Éditions Outremontaises (2012), from IMSLP[1], licensed CC BY-SA 4.0[2]. Cropped and de-skewed for display; the adapted images are distributed under the same licence.

Score source · CC BY-SA 4.0