There's one piece I keep coming back to, year after year, both as a performer and as a listener. It's not the piece most people expect me to name. It's not the calm, rolling Prelude that everyone knows from "Ave Maria." It's the one that comes right after it in Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier — Prelude No. 2 in C minor, BWV 847.

I've taught this piece. I've performed it. I've listened to it late at night when I couldn't sleep and early in the morning before I could think straight. And every single time, it strikes me the same way: this piece sounds like life.

Bach wrote this Prelude in 1722, as part of the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier — a collection meant to explore every major and minor key, and to prove that a well-tuned keyboard could play beautifully in all of them. Right before it sits the gentle, arpeggiated C Major Prelude, the one most people have heard a thousand times without knowing its name. Prelude No. 2 is its opposite. Where the first one breathes, this one runs.

From the very first note, the hands are in constant motion — fast sixteenth notes weaving through both voices, one phrase spilling into the next with almost no room to pause. It's commonly ranked around Grade 7 to 8 by major examination boards, with some placing it as high as Grade 9. In the original set, it's paired with a Fugue — but the Fugue is actually one of the gentler ones in the whole collection. The real challenge, the real fire, is in the Prelude. That's why I always teach and share it on its own.

Here's the part I don't often say out loud, but I want to share it with you.

When I play or listen my students playing this Prelude, it doesn't just sound like a technical study in finger independence. It sounds like a life being lived. It moves me every time I hear it. 

The opening feels like chasing something — running toward a goal, a deadline, a version of yourself you haven't reached yet. The notes don't let up. There's urgency in every measure, the same urgency I think we all recognize from our own lives: the mornings we rush through, the goals we're always reaching for, the feeling that if we just move a little faster, we'll finally arrive somewhere.

And then, without warning, the music opens up. There's a moment — you'll hear it when you listen — where the constant motion gives way to something wider, something that breathes. It's brief. But it's there. And to me, that moment is the whole point of the piece. It's Bach reminding us, three hundred years before anyone coined the phrase "slow down and smell the roses," that the chase isn't the only thing worth paying attention to. Sometimes the most beautiful moment in the piece — and in life — is the one where you stop running and simply notice what's around you.

I don't think that reading is an accident of my imagination. Bach was a deeply spiritual composer, and so much of his keyboard music carries this same shape: tension, motion, and then a resolution that feels like relief. This Prelude just does it more dramatically than almost anything else he wrote for solo keyboard.

Watch one of my intermediate student playing it. When I showed this piece to him he said; "No way I could play it!" But he did and loved it! He even won a Piano Audition and got a scholarship! 

For a long time, I hesitated to bring this piece to my intermediate students. It has a reputation — deserved — as a technically demanding piece, one built for players with years of training behind them. But the more I sat with it, the more I realized that the "impossible" reputation was doing more harm than good. Adult students would hear it, love it, and immediately assume it wasn't for them.

That assumption is exactly the kind of overwhelm I try to remove from my students' path. You don't need to have started piano at age five to play real, meaningful classical music. You need the right piece, clear fingering, and a teacher who breaks the hard parts into steps that actually make sense. This Prelude, played thoughtfully and practiced patiently, is absolutely within reach for a dedicated intermediate player — and the payoff, both musically and personally, is enormous.

There's a story I love about the great cellist Pablo Casals, who was still playing Bach every single morning well into his nineties. He once said that simply knowing he would play Bach that day gave him a reason to keep going. I understand that completely. There's something about this composer's music — and this piece in particular — that resets you. It untangles whatever knot the day has tied in your chest.

If this piece has ever moved you — whether you've heard it in passing or you've been chasing the idea of playing real Bach for years — I'd love for you to experience it from the inside, at the keys, rather than just as a listener.

I've rearranged the sheet music: while keeping all notes original to Bach's notation I made it in large, easy-to-read notation, suggested fingering marked throughout, dynamical marks and changeds exactly how I teach it to my one on one students. 

🎼 Get the Prelude No. 2 in C Minor sheet music here — Start your own musical journey and take your piano technique to the next level with this beautiful piece.

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Because whether you're chasing the piece, or finally ready to slow down and enjoy it — there's no wrong time to start.