Description
Prelude in C major is the first prelude from The Well-Tempered Clavier by Johann Sebastian Bach. This is a lever harp arrangement by Zuzanna Olbryś.
Suitable for:
– lever harps (range: 6C to 2A)
Level: HIGHER INTERMEDIATE (grade 4-5 difficulty level)
This piece will be suitable for anyone who has played the harp for at least a few years. This arrangement includes exercises for directional placing, chords fingering and changing levers that you can practise while learning the Prelude. Lever changes are marked clearly in red – all levers changes are to be made with by the left hand.
A short lesson on this piece including video of me playing and teaching the Prelude as well as demonstration of the exercises is available here.
Watch the lesson
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Jane Stokes (verified owner) –
Zuzanna’s helpful PDF on directional placing and fingering patterns is very useful for the righthand in this piece. Her exercise of practising the chord shapes as block chords is also of great benefit. However, the most challenging aspect of this piece are the lever changes. Bach being Bach, I knew there would be many accidentals. In fact, there are 16 lever changes in total but due to some pre-sets, page one has none. Page 2 has 10 and page 3 has 6 (in the 3-page version). Zuzanna has marked them clearly in the score but make sure your printer is switched to ‘colour mode’ to get them printed in red.
I regard myself as an intermediate player but have never attempted a piece with so many lever changes. They need to be incorporated as left-hand movements in your practice from the moment you first tackle the Prelude. A couple of lever changes can’t be set in the bar before so have to be set quickly, just before the note is played. The music is true to the original score by Bach apart from the substitution of one note, a higher octave F, in bar 21. Interestingly, as this is such a well-known piece, my ears missed the sound of the low F so I have decided to incorporate it. This means yet another lever change on a ringing bass string which also means quickly dampening the string before putting on the lever to avoid horrible buzzing!
A lot more work is still needed for me to feel confident with this piece but as a lever player, I am very pleased to be on the way to having a beautiful and much-loved piece of Bach in my repertoire.
Veronica Vannini (verified owner) –
I begin my Prelude but first of all your exercises!! Very useful 🤩!!!
Memorize the chords before learn them as arpeggios, it’s a good trick 😉, I always do in this way for my pieces and for the news ones.
See you soon.
Veronica from Italy 🇮🇹