Thirty-five bars of one broken chord, opening the most influential keyboard collection ever written.
In 1722 Bach assembled twenty-four preludes and fugues, one in every major and minor key, and wrote on the title page that they were for the use and profit of musical young people eager to learn. The Well-Tempered Clavier opens with this prelude in C major — the plainest key and the plainest idea in the book: a single broken-chord figure, five notes rising and falling, repeated in the same rhythm for thirty-five bars.
Nothing in the prelude changes except the harmony. Each bar takes one chord and spreads it out; the chords step through a sequence that keeps leaning away from C major and back towards it, and the piece is essentially that harmonic journey made audible. Gounod later laid a melody over the whole thing and called the result Ave Maria, which is how a great many people first meet it.
Written for harpsichord and clavichord — the piano barely existed. Pianists have claimed it as their own for two centuries.
This is one of the most sensible first real pieces there is. Both hands stay in one position for a whole bar, the pattern never changes, and there is nothing fast in it. What you are learning is evenness — the same five notes at the same weight, bar after bar — and how to hear a chord change when its notes arrive one at a time instead of together.
It is also a piece the app does not try to simplify. Measured by what the hands actually have to do, this prelude is already a beginner’s piece: one note at a time in each hand, one harmony per bar. There is nothing to take out, so it has a single level — and we would rather say so than invent three easier versions of something that is already easy. What is left to work with is the tempo, wait mode, and one hand at a time.
No levelled arrangement for this one yet — you play the score as it stands, with the app's tempo control, wait mode and one-hand practice to get you there. Levelled arrangements are added a curated batch at a time. See the Library
