Three centuries ago Johann Sebastian Bach combined his matchless knowledge of counterpoint and inexhaustible imagination to create forty-eight pairs of preludes and fugues in all the keys. His revolutionary keyboard pieces, gathered in the two volumes of The Well-Tempered Clavier, stand among western art’s towering landmarks.

The Paris and Chicago-based Franco-American pianist George Lepauw was compelled to record the complete preludes and fugues by his ‘desire to become a more complete musician, and a better human being’.

But first, in the Winter of 2017 Lepauw traveled in Bach’s footsteps, tracing the arc of the composer’s life from his birthplace in Eisenach to his grave in Leipzig, in order to feel more connected to the man behind the name Bach. He returned to Germany six months later to record The Well-Tempered Clavier in Weimar’s Jakobskirche, a church well-known to Bach and close to where he had served the dukes of Saxe-Weimar and was briefly imprisoned by his aristocratic masters for disobedience.

Bach48: The Complete Well-Tempered Clavier charts Lepauw’s life-enhancing encounter with the composer. “These pieces contain everything there is to say about the human condition,” notes Lepauw. “What I feel today, having completed the recording of these preludes and fugues, is something that marks life. It has taught me that my folly has a reason.”