Contrapunctus I, from The Art of Fugue

Bach’s Art of Fugue stands at the end of his long and incredibly productive life. A mythical aura surrounds the work, and its puzzles have continued to exercise scholars for the last 250 years. His compositional career, so rich in polyphonic music, culminates in a grand and admittedly complex way with Art of Fugue. Left incomplete at his death on July 28, 1750, almost all the material survives in Bach’s own hand in a copy written out in 1745. Hence it would be incorrect to regard the Art of Fugue as an intentional “last will.” This collection is unified by the presence of a single motto theme—which, just to be clear, is not B-A-C-H. The motto provides the point of departure for nearly every fugue. It epitomizes Bach’s desire to comprehensively explore, sometimes in breathtaking detail, the musical possibilities inherent in a deceptively simple melody. (A similar purpose inspired the contemporaneous Musical Offering.) The end results are fourteen fugues, each called a “contrapunctus,” and four canons arranged in order of increasing complexity. Different fugues present the motto theme upright, inverted, expanded and contracted in terms of rhythm, with numerous counterthemes, and in various styles and articulations. Tonight we hear the first and last fugues.
Contrapunctus No. 1 lasts about four minutes and resembles many four-voice fugues found in Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. But Contrapunctus No. 14, which ends the collection, is far more unique and substantial. It is as interesting for what it includes as for what it does not include. Lasting over ten minutes and touching on three distinct themes, one of the main ideas is a fugue built on the pitch pattern B-A-C-H (BL-A-C-BJ). At the same time, it is the only piece in the Art of Fugue that does not include the motto. Moreover, Bach did not complete the piece; the manuscript copy cuts off mid-phrase. Some have seen the absence of the motto as a reason to exclude this fugue from the collection. Others, for instance Davitt Moroney, believe Bach may have been leading up to a final, motto-based grand finish that he did not actually have time to write before his sight failed.

(c) Jason Stell