You can’t say A without saying B: pianist Marcel Worms took up the challenge, to record the second book after his double album with the complete first book of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier (2020). Bach completed the second book twenty years after the first, and in those two decades his composing has deepened even further. The Preludes have emancipated and are sometimes longer than the accompanying Fugues, the complexity of the music has increased, and the work as a whole is more abstract and spiritual. Add to that the length of the work (about half an hour longer than book I) and the assignment for the pianist is clear.

It was a significant step: the decision of the French composer Erik Satie, in 1884, to write his first name henceforth with a “k”. He was born on 17 May 1866 as Eric Satie in Normandy’s Honfleur, from where England lies almost in view. His mother, born in London, had English and Scottish blood. And in his work and in his personage, irony, understatement, and British-sounding humour are never far away. Despite an unmistakably French sound in his music, he did not regard himself as a musicien français, as his friend Debussy styled himself on his card.

The Well-Tempered Clavier (Book 1) contains 24 preludes and 24 fugues, each piece a personality with its own unique character. A prelude is always followed by a fugue in the same key. With an endless fantasy Bach lets the different voices speak, each for itself yet also in dialogue with and attuned to each other. A perfect technical mastery of the form goes hand in hand with the ability to translate all conceivable human emotions into sound.