Passepied in C, HWV 559

The passepied is a French Baroque dance — a quick triple-time piece with a feather-light step, faster than a minuet and meant to lift on the off-beats. Handel's HWV 559 is a short keyboard passepied from the loose group of pieces in the HWV catalogue's keyboard miscellany. Peter Wild's Trinity edition is a clean, pedagogical engraving without editorial overlay.

The piece sits in C major and stays in a comfortable five-finger position. The technical demand is rhythmic: the dance lift only works if the second beat lifts off the first and the third leans gently toward the next downbeat. Both hands move in clear two-bar patterns; there are no tricky leaps and no chromatic notes to negotiate.

The pitfall is heaviness. Students play the bass line firmly and the dance flattens into a march. Practise with a very light left hand and let the right hand carry the dance shape. A second pitfall is over-pedalling — this is Baroque writing, and clean finger-legato with at most a touch of pedal at cadences is far more idiomatic than a continuous wash.

Listen to a period-instrument recording of any of Handel's keyboard suites (the HWV 426–433 set is the canonical group) to internalise the bounce of an authentic Baroque triple metre before sitting down with the passepied.