I remember the night that my father came home from work with a copy of the Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields’ recording of Bach’s The Art of Fugue. It was a double-LP boxed-set (recorded music came on black vinyl discs in those days) with extensive booklet of liner notes. My father let me read the notes, but insisted that we would only listen to the records when we had time to sit through all four sides without interruption. My next few days were filled with curiosity and anticipation.
He called me into the living room on the following Sunday for what he called “a concert.” It was a bright winter afternoon of the type that we used to get in early January in Montreal. The sun flooded through the big picture window, reflecting off the snow drifts in our front yard. I was eleven or twelve years old, and had spent the morning skating and playing shinny on a patch of ice cleared on Lac St-Louis behind the Town Hall. We had had the traditional Friedman weekend lunch of bagels, lox, and tomato soup.
Placing the first disk on the stereo turntable, my father promised that I was “in for a real treat.” The tone arm moved, the stylus dropped to the groove on the record… And my life was changed forever.
I am sure that many people have had moments of artistic revelation – even many of them; that moment when a book, a poem, a painting, a film or a work of music opens up a whole new aesthetic vista. I was no stranger to music. My father had an enormous (for the time) collection of records, ranging from the Deutsche Grammophon bicentennial collection of Beethoven’s complete symphonies, concertos and overtures to jazz and boxed sets from the Newport Folk Festivals. We listened to the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts together with the kind of devotion that more religious Jews attended schul, and we regularly attended concerts by l’Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal and the McGill Chamber Orchestra.
My mother played the baby grand piano in our living room brilliantly. In retrospect, I believe that she loved the experience of producing music with the graceful, balletic motions of her hands – music that would fill the house from glassy piano to thunderous forte – more than the music itself. She inclined toward Mozart and Chopin, and would often pull scores from the bench pretty much at random, mixing it up with Scott Joplin and arrangements of songs from Fiddler on the Roof. Her performances were full of delicacy and passion, and I would often imagine her looking through the score to some distant point as she inhabited the sounds.
I had the benefit of a thorough, if unconventional, childhood education in music. My grade school music teacher Andreas Gutmanis imparted musical knowledge with a combination of urgency and enthusiasm. He put my classmates and me through the paces of the Orff Method – tee-tee tee-tee tah-tah on the school’s xylophones and glockenspiels – without great success. His real interest was in getting us to listen to music, however, and he would frequently draw the curtains and have us listen attentively and respectfully to everything from Mozart to Morton Subotnick’s electronic masterpiece Silver Apples of the Moon. In that, he was immensely successful, and I am astonished at how many of his students became musicians.
Mr. Gutmanis taught me the violin. I loved the instrument, even though I hated practicing. My first concert performance was in a third-grade recital of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” in all of the Suzuki variations. My father introduced me to conductor and pedagogue Brock McElheran when I was five. Dr. McElheran presented me with a baton and a copy of his book Conducting Techniques for Beginners and Professionals and gave me a series of private – though informal – lessons. (I still have both the baton and the book.) I later studied the piano and the flute and, though I never displayed any great talent, I learned to read music and to appreciate its beauty at a very profound level.
The Art of Fugue, however, was an epiphany. It is an extraordinary piece of music, and the performance by the Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields is outstanding. The experience of listening to this music for the first time, in that time and place, utterly transformed me. It was the first time that I heard music from the inside – and saw it too, for this was a profoundly synesthetic experience. The counterpoint rose above and around me like the vaults of a gothic cathedral. Years later, I saw a photo of the nave of the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, where Bach was cantor and Director of Music for more than half of his career, and said out loud “yes, yes, that’s what I saw!”
Although the beauty of The Art of Fugue is highly architectural, the fugal lines of Bach’s masterpiece are never static. They move, and sweep and dance in ribbons of melody. The music is always serious and contemplative, a product of the Enlightenment, yet it is full of dark depths, ecstatic highs, and restrained passions evoking both the religious foundations of Bach’s work and the chromatic future. It is both a palimpsest and a prophecy, and it ends abruptly 239 bars into the last, immense, four-voice, triple fugue – apocryphally at Bach’s death.
If I was to identify the starting point of the trajectory that led me to become a music historian, that would be it. It is the ursprung of my own intellectual and professional genealogy. The process certainly was not quite that simple or predetermined; I have drifted and dodged in any number of professional and scholarly directions in the decades since, and my scholarship no longer focuses primarily, or even mostly, on the history of music. But listening to The Art of Fugue on that afternoon, and every time since, I find myself connected to a nexus of history, art, culture and the genius of an artist whom I never met but somehow know intimately.
The Art of Fugue is a clear, unembellished glimpse into the mind of the composer. All there is of it are the notes; it contains no indications of tempo or dynamics – does one play the Contrapunctus 8 as largo or allegretto? Does one make the first statement of the B-A-C-H motif in the Fuga a 3 Soggetti in the booming forte of a lion or in the gentle pianissimo of a lamb? The composer Christian Wolff once observed to me that Bach’s music is as indeterminate – and perhaps moreso – than what he or Morton Feldman, or even John Cage himself wrote because it prescribes none of this. Is The Art of Fuge a work of sturm und drang passion, or an entirely cerebral exercise in abstraction? It is up to the performer, or performers, to determine, so there can never be an authoritative performance.
I am always reminded of a lecture by the musicologist Joshua Rifkin I attended years ago. Rifkin explained that the correct – what we today call the “historically-informed” – way to perform Bach’s choral works is to assign one singer to each part (soprano, alto, tenor, bass) because his scores do not indicate additional forces. It is a compelling argument, and once that, in the 1980s and 1990s, challenged a century of choral performance practice. Rifkin’s 1982 recording of the B-Minor Mass with the Bach Ensemble (Nonesuch 79036) is a delicate, moving drama-in-miniature; a tour-de-force of musical and spiritual subtlety. It is a radically different work than Helmuth Rilling’s recording from the same score with the Collegium Stuttgart and Gächinger Kantorei Stuttgart only five years earlier (CBS Masterworks 79307), but I would be hard-pressed to say it is better. I listen to both, and Andrew Parrott’s (with the incomparable Emma Kirkby), and Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s, with equal frequency. They are all unique, and different, performances.
This is even more true of The Art of Fugue. The last (or nearly-last) of Bach’s compositions, it remains incomplete at the moment of the composer’s great triumph in the final fugue. I have a deep fascination with the ultimum opus – W.A. Mozart’s incomplete Requiem, the Adagio from Gustav Mahler’s unfinished Symphony No. 10 – and what it says about a composer at the very peak of their creative powers. But there is even more to The Art of Fugue than that: We do not know what instrument or ensemble Bach composed it for, if he had anything specific in mind.
The Bach scholar Christoph Wolff (no relation to Christian Wolff) notes that the composer had already begun preparing The Art of Fugue for publication at least three years before his death in 1750, even if he was still working on the later movements. In his book Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven, Gardiner speculates that it was meant to be the fifth volume of the Clavier-Übung, Bach’s exhaustive compendium of the art of keyboard music, which also contains the Goldberg Variations and the six keyboard Partitas. Yet, The Art of Fugue exists, in Bach’s hand, only in open score – four staves for the traditional four voices of soprano, alto, tenor, and bass. These are, of course, the conventional four choral parts, as well as the four parts of a string quartet and a traditional baroque string orchestra, representing the violin I, violin II, viola, and cello. Conventional keyboard music typically combines the parts into left- and right-hand, but we do not know what Bach’s intent was with respect to such an arrangement, and all keyboard performances today are performed from scores prepared by scholars like Christoph Wolff.
So, whatever the composer’s intent, all we have are the notes in their staves, standing starkly as abstractions both of music, and of Bach’s imagination – uncomplicated by intentionalities, performance practice, the sonorities and timbres of instrumentation, and human passion. In that sense, The Art of Fuge is the archetypal exposition of what the modern composer Arnold Schoenberg would call die Idee: “If one may designate as ideas the production of relations between things, concepts, and the like… then in the case of a musical idea, such a relation can only be established between tones, and it can only be a musical idea.” In Schoenberg’s thinking, die musikalische Idee is entirely self-sufficient and self-constituting… and perhaps also for Bach.
This, I think, is what so excited me about The Art of Fugue the first time I heard it, and in every subsequent listening with my pocket score in hand, whether it has been performed by Marriner and the Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields (Phillips 6747 172), the Emerson Quartet (Deutsche Grammophon B0000908-02), Karl Ristenpart and the Chamber Orchestra of the Saar (Nonesuch HB-73013), on the piano by Pierre-Laurent Aimard (Deutsche Grammophon 477 7345), or by anyone else. This is music that transcends instrumentation and performance and, in its ineffable perfection, grants a glimpse of what Bach himself imagined as the Castle of Heaven. That is the gift that my father gave me on that sunny winter afternoon all those years ago.
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Image: The vaults and organ of the Thomaskirche in Leipzig