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Christ Church Cathedral
October 31, 2019
The title of Johann Sebastian Bach's Die Kunst der Fuge is usually rendered into English either as The Art of Fugue or as The Art of the Fugue (italics added).
Somehow the former seems preferable, hinting at a philosophical form of the fugue, a Platonic Ideal, perhaps, that is beyond the reach of the mere human.
And surely, if one had ever entertained any doubts, BWV1080, as Wolfgang Schmieder's 1950 catalogue dubbed it, is proof positive that Bach was most emphatically not merely human.
But regardless of exactly how we translate Bach's title, there are several questions we must ask ourselves about the music.
Firstly, should it be performed at all?
A number of musicologists have asserted that Bach actually wrote it as a theoretical treatise on counterpoint; others, such as Bach's son Carl Phillip Emmanuel and Albert Schweitzer, believed it to be a training manual.
And Bach may, indeed, have intended it for either or perhaps both of those purposes, but Ye Gods! it is such an endlessly fascinating and engrossing work, even for those of use who cannot, while listening, catch every last subtle detail, surely it demands to be heard and therefore, performed?
Having addressed that question, we must then ask: on what instrument or instruments should it be played?
Here tradition is of little or no help, as the first complete performance (there may have been performances of individual fugues previously) was less than a century ago, in 1927, when Bach scholar Wolfgang Graeser directed his own orchestration in Leipzig. So popular did it prove, that for the subsequent performances, special "Art of Fugue" express trains from Berlin were laid on.
Shortly thereafter, the music was taken up by organists; today, there is a veritable plethora of versions available for many differing instrumental combinations and while I would not claim anything like completeness, my own library has several orchestrated versions, versions for string quartet, for saxophone quartet, for keyboards (one or two) and more. (And let it not be forgotten that the Swingle Singers kicked off their first LP, "Jazz Sebastian Bach", in 1963, with Contrapunctus IX, underlining the fact that Bach was also arguably the greatest jazz composer of all time.)
And even though the consort of viols had been going out of fashion at the time of his birth (it is thought that the last music written for such an ensemble, before modern times, was by Henry Purcell in the 1680s) Bach thought enough of the instrument to write three sonatas for viola da gamba and harpsichord, so the notion of The Art of Fugue's being performed by a consort of viols would surely not have been anathema to him.
Finally, of course, we must ask: what about that last, unfinished fugue?
The myth, first promulgated by Carl Phillip Emanuel Bach, that his father had died mid-composition (the final fugue ends abruptly after 239 bars) is one which dies hard. Yet, as Christoph Wolff points out, Bach must surely have at least drafted the combinatorial possibilities of the four themes which, woven together, would have been the culmination of this final fugue, a fugue which he composed almost as an afterthought, as the engraving of the music had already begun when he started it.
Moreover, as was clear from the image of the manuscript displayed during Richard Boothby's pre-concert talk, the composer who wrote those final bars was still in control of his faculties and was not the sick man, almost blinded by "oculist" Chevalier John Taylor (who also performed incompetent and unsuccessful surgery on Handel).
Why, then, did Bach not complete The Art of Fugue?
One recent suggestion, from a 2007 Doctoral Thesis by New Zealand organist and musicologist Indra Hughes, is that Bach deliberately left the fugue unfinished to encourage others to complete it for themselves: "as an exercise for the reader" as textbooks would have it.
This would certainly accord with the notion that The Art of Fugue was intended as a theoretical treatise and yet...
There are two performance traditions connected with the last, unfinished fugue. One is simply to play the music as Bach left it, coming to an abrupt end shortly after the composer introduced his own musical signature (B-A-C-H in German notation indicating B flat, A, C, B natural); performances and recordings which do so frequently end by appending the chorale prelude "Vor deinen Thron treit ich hier mit" which may actually have been the last music which the now-blind Bach dictated on his death bed and which was published in 1751 as an appendix to The Art of Fugue.
The other notion is to perform a completion of the final fugue and there have been at least a dozen made over the years and even one "completion" which grew into a far larger work in which the fugue is embedded: Busoni's Fantasia Contrappuntistica.
On this occasion Fretwork performed a completion by Boothby himself, very tastefully done, which enabled the music to end rather than simply stop. If I still prefer to hear only what Bach himself wrote, that may say a good deal about me, but nothing about the quality of Boothby's (or, indeed, anybody else's) completion.
As to the performance itself it was, throughout, riveting and beautifully played. Tempos were ideally chosen and the ensemble displayed a superb unanimity of tone and phrasing.
After the music had come to an end, we all stood to leave the chapel, yet having stood I discovered that I could not break the spell by actually moving and so stood rooted to the spot for what seemed liked several minutes, still under the spell of this wonderful performance of this supreme masterpiece.
Was Bach the greatest composer in history? I have long thought so and a performance of this standard simply reinforced my view.
In a word: transcendent.
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