About this Piece

 Bach wrote canons and fugues throughout his creative life. But in his final decade he turned to those old procedures of imitative counterpoint with renewed inspiration and intensity. The Goldberg Variations, the Canonic Variations on the Christmas Song “Vom Himmel hoch,” The Musical Offering, and The Art of Fugue are all rigorously organized, large-scale works based on a single theme. Against the prevailing grain of the modish galant style, Bach explored the farthest technical and expressive reaches of complex counterpoint.

“I think that Bach was, in a sense, ‘out for blood’ when composing The Art of Fugue,” Paul Jacobs has said. “After all, musical tastes were changing dramatically in the mid-18th century. Bach’s own sons were catalysts for displacing his preferred ‘old’ contrapuntal style for a lighter, simpler music. Possibly as an act of artistic defiance, Bach set out to prove that there was still much to express in writing intricate fugues. The jaw-dropping complexity of this uncompromising work, left unfinished on his deathbed, has proven a crowning achievement in the history of music.”

Time has vindicated Bach and his monumental efforts, though the fugue in general not so much. “Why should I write a fugue or something that won’t appeal to anyone, when the people yearn for things which can stir them?” Elgar asked rhetorically about a century ago, and the old joke that a fugue is a piece of music in which the parts come in one after another and the listeners go out one after another still has some currency.

But for Bach, the recursive layers of fugues intensified the expressive power of a theme. He exploited the techniques not just in pieces that carried “fugue” as a title, but also at climactic moments or movements in choral, orchestral, and chamber music works of all kinds, including the almost paradoxical fugues for solo violin and cello.

Bach composed The Art of Fugue in two stages—possibly interrupted by the creation of The Musical Offering for Frederick the Great in 1747—during the last five years of his life. He was preparing the work for publication when he died, leaving behind an incomplete manuscript and a host of questions.

The main body of this ostensibly pedagogical work consisted of 14 fugues, organized roughly in order of increasing complexity. (Bach used the word contrapunctus, an archaic term even then, instead of fugue on these pieces.) There are also four canons—a stricter, less flexible implementation of the fugal principle—on the same D-minor subject, and alternative versions of some of the fugues.

The final fugue, which was intended to be an epic with four subjects, is unfinished in the manuscript. It just stops in mid-flow, after the introduction of the third subject, which was based on Bach’s own name. (In the German system, B-A-C-H are the pitches B-flat, A, C, B-natural, a pattern that also represents a cross.) At that point in the manuscript, Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach wrote “While working on this fugue, which introduces the name BACH in the countersubject, the composer died.” 

That is probably not true, though the image of the composer dying just as he musically signed this masterpiece-in-the-making has given it the nickname “Death Fugue” for some writers. Bach’s handwriting at that point has not changed, indicating that he had not yet tried to correct his worsening eyesight. He turned to one Dr. John Taylor, a depressingly successful traveling quack, for surgical treatment. After a cataract operation, he regained some sight, but it faded quickly and the procedure had to be repeated. This left Bach completely blind and greatly weakened; in the post-operative aftermath he suffered a stroke and died 10 days later. (Handel survived an operation by the same doctor; he lived another seven years, but almost completely blind.)

Many musicians have completed this fugue, but many others, such as Paul Jacobs, prefer to play it as it is, crashing into an echoing well of silence. Other questions about the work abound, including which instrument(s) it was intended for, if any. But even with the uncertainties, this is as transcendental a farewell as any composer has ever left, probing the mysteries of pure beauty with the exacting but simple tool of the fugue.

—John Henken