The Bad Tempered Roon

Hi

II have multiple versions of Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier, Roon Metadata mixes them up beautifully

I see a mix of

The Well-Tempered Clavier (24), collections of preludes & fugues, Book I, BWV 846-869 (BC L80-103)

The Well-Tempered Clavier (24), collections of preludes & fugues, Book II, BWV 870-893 (BC L104-127)

The Well-Tempered Clavier (48), collections of preludes & fugues in 2 Books, BWV 846-893 (BC L80-127)

Why is there no consistent metadata . I guess since some recordings are of Book I , others Book II and others yet all 48 . Its even worse since there are single works as excerpts too

I can manually adjust and Prefer File but some are part of big box sets so that disrupts the rest

How would Johann Sebastian want it shown ?

Any Thoughts ?

As a score?

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According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Well-Tempered_Clavier he probably intended to be Book I shown as Book I - but it seems to be unknown how things should look like for Book II.

But then I’m not sure if J.S. would want to use Roon… :wink:

Quite a can of worms here. There is an almost complete disconnect between Bach’s original naming conventions for these works and modern cataloging systems.

I got curious. You can find the original manuscripts in various digital archives. For a kick-off the BWV numbers only came in 1950, revised in 1990. Bach also didn’t use the term “Book”, or 24 or 48. He didn’t specify the key as you could work that out from the clefs of his scores. They were not even numbered as the sequence also was “obvious” as he was cycling through all the major and minor keys. Hence the grouping of 24. The first Book is not called Book 1 and the second Book is not called Book 2 either but “Part 2”. So already there is hardly any cataloging information left at all if you go back to the originals. Probably the motivation for the BWV numbers.

Book 1 was from 1722. It wasn’t actually published until around 1800 well after his death. The surviving manuscripts seem to have been in his own and his wife’s hand. Book 2 was written down twenty years later. So they are not two parts of a whole. They certainly sound quite different to me. These handwritten manuscripts seem to have been passed around the famous recitalists of the day including Mozart and Beethoven.

So what I tend to do is keep the Books separate and use the allmusic conventions. I haven’t got around to this in all cases if the books have come through joined together in metadata. Where there are excerpts of 3/4 preludes/fugues which you often find in recital type discs, personally I group them against the relevant book and merge with the complete books. With a single prelude/fugue which tends to be the more famous ones I keep them separate and merge them with other singletons. Given the history of these works I don’t think there is a right and a wrong way but this works for me.

i can split nearly all of my recordings like this except one which is part of 20 set,it would mean adding Work\Part to all 20 discs

Maybe one rainy afternoon

Do you have to do that for the entire box? I often just do it for a single composition here and there.

it rained , didnt take long

i wanted to prefer file so i had to the lot, is ok now