The Well-Tempered Clavier Prelude No. 1 in C Major

Twenty-four measures in C major, and the world slows down. The Well-Tempered Clavier's opening prelude requires almost nothing of the performer technically — the left hand sustains while the right hand arpeggiates broken chords in a steady, rocking figure that never varies in rhythm — and yet in the right hands it becomes something close to meditative transcendence. Charles Gounod famously added a melodic line above it and called it an Ave Maria, and the impulse makes sense: the music has the quality of a sustained, open-eyed prayer, unhurried and untroubled. Bach wrote it partly to demonstrate equal temperament's possibility — every key equally available — and chose C major, the most neutral palette, to make the harmonic colour of the key system itself audible. What has survived from that pedagogical purpose is something more universal: the sense of harmonic space opening like a room slowly filling with light. Each chord change is minimal but perceptible, the key centre hovering rather than resolving, a musical state of patient, ongoing expectation. It is among the most universally recognized two minutes in Western classical music.