The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Friday, March 21, 2025

Notably: Bach is 340 years old today. As always, there’s a spate of new recordings to mark the occasion, including this interesting recording of The Art of Fugue, Bach’s last work (he never finished it) and one of his more sublimely complex, written for organ, but performed here by Phantasm, a quartet of viols, plus organ. From he liner notes: “Singing – playing lyrically – is exactly what a consort of viols can offer to the Art of Fugue. For here is an ensemble used to ‘singing’ its parts while engaging with other voices within a constantly shifting polyphonic web. […] On this recording four viols play in all the fugues (apart from only three in Contrapunctus 8). The wizardry of the four canons, on the other hand, falls into a different musical genre: as complex interrogations of pure contrapuntal technique and, as works that refrain from dialogue, they are better heard on the organ. The core of the work – the first eleven fugues – progresses through the three classic types of fugues: simple fugues (Contrapunctus 1 to 4) which avoid invertible counterpoint, counterfugues (Contrapunctus 5 to 7) which feature melodic inversion and thematic augmentation, and double fugues (Contrapunctus 8 – 11) which highlight countersubjects and invertible counterpoint. […] So why didn’t Bach finish the Art of Fugue? Many explanations are possible, but I suspect the composer had second thoughts about sending a work that proclaimed – with a rather atypical vanity – his boldly embroidered family emblem, no matter how well-deserved this proclamation. That is, even if he could easily have worked out the remainder of the final fugue whose the three themes he had already combined with one another, Bach chose through his inaction to leave it unfinished at his death. Perhaps he was alarmed at a published display of personal pride, a mortal sin, after all. To flaunt his own name as an explicit theme in the Art of Fugue was a rather different matter from merely recounting to friends, as we know he did, how the Bach family could boast of their devotion to music because their name formed a melody. More likely, Bach realized that the prominent appearance of B-A-C-H was no mere trifle or witticism, but rather an unacceptably immodest pronouncement that may have compromised how he wished his legacy to be seen.

—P.T.

 

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No matter how many versions and adaptations of Bach’s The Art of Fugue there may be, one of the most enthralling questions is how performers approach the great fugue that is normally played at the end of the work. Bach was unable to complete it because of his failing eyesight and sudden death, but for this very reason the piece is regarded as the composer’s musical testament since it is explicitly signed with his name: the notes B-flat–A–C–B (in German
nomenclature B–A–C–H) constitute one of its four themes and appear here in an exceptionally prominent position. This movement is already the longest in Bach’s original, but Reinhard Febel expands it in his Study 18 until it lasts some fifteen minutes. In doing so, he takes up all of the compositional procedures of expansion and alienation that he had previously used, before breaking off at the very point where the fugue ends in Bach’s autograph score. What follows is an atmospherically otherworldly echo like a distant reminiscence of the monumental original. It is only logical that Febel weaves into it the theme that Bach intended to use but never got round to realizing, the archetypal and striking D minor theme that underpins the entire collection, heard here in a variant in A flat minor that appears lost in a world of dreams. Study 18 and, with it, the cycle as a whole ends with a long bar of silence.

–From the liner notes by Michaela Fridrich to Reinhard Febel’s “18 Studies on ‘The Art of Fugue,‘” Sony, 2020.

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