This is such a simple, sunny work, and it is barely more than a minute long. It opens with one of the few pure right-hand melodies of the Well-Tempered, an upward-tilting arpeggio followed by graceful, decorated arabesques. Most of the piece’s material is stated in about the first thirty seconds. Look and listen for gray clouds (or is a moment of troubled introspection?) to appear on the horizon between 0:24–0:29 to dampen the mood. But just a moment later, they evaporate, leaving only good feelings.

There is a short middle section, and then the piece begins again at 0:51, but this time up a fourth in A major. This area matches the first almost exactly, and even has the same gray moment near the end.

Don’t over think this prelude: the music has no message or agenda except to sound pretty and brighten your day!

To hear its spirit twin, listen to #85, the Prelude in A major from Book II.

For theory buffs:

If one excludes the middle episode, mm. 8–14, the piece can be heard in simple binary form with a subdominant recapitulation. The first section modulates, as expected, from I-V. In opting to restart in IV in the second half at m.15, Bach is able to use the same exact music to get from V-I without having to even re-write the modulatory material. The piece is thus tonally “balanced” I-V // IV-I, to use David Lewin’s terminology. The subdominant recap is a strategy that Schubert deploys often in his sonata forms; Mozart does so, too, in the first movement of his Sonata in C, K. 545.

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