(no subject)
Дополнение к дополнению.
Г-н Гульд рассуждает об "И.ф.", в т.ч. об незавершенном Contrapunctus XV.
(QT movie, 48 Mb)
The Art of the Fugue by David Johnson
Bach began composing his Art of the Fugue in 1748 or 1749 and continued to work on it in 1750, the last year of his life. He had finished three-fourths of fugue No.15 when a severe eye disease obliged him to leave off work on his artistic last will and testament and undergo an operation. A combination of primitive medical techniques and a blundering doctor proved fatal; within six months of this operation, Bach was dead. He spent his last days in a darkened room, alone with the God he had served and glorified all his life. When he felt death close upon him, he sent for his son-in-law, the musician Altnikol, and dictated to him not the conclusion of the great B-A-C-H fugue but a chorale fantasia on the melody "When We Are in Deepest Need," telling Altnikol to entitle it "I Draw Near Unto Thy Throne." "In the manuscript we can see all the pauses that the sick man had to permit himself," Albert Schweitzer narrates; "the drying ink becomes more watery from day to day; the notes written in the twilight, with the windows closely curtained, can hardly be deciphered."
This last composition from Bach's pen was included in the first edition of the Art of the Fugue, not because it belongs with that work but as an apologetic compensation to the purchaser for the incompleteness of the work itself. How incomplete the Art of the Fugue is we do not know. The mammoth Fugue No. 15 may have been the final one of the series, or Bach may have planned to follow it with a still more grandiose quadruple fugue. The latter contention was Sir Donald Tovey's, and Tovey actually completed the fifteenth fugue and composed, as the sixteenth, a totally invertible fugue with four subjects, to prove that such a feat was possible and that Bach had something of the sort in mind. Most performances of the Art of the Fugue, however, are content to break off where Bach himself broke off, for there is something awesome about this sudden silence just at the point when Bach introduced the letters of his own name for the first time into one of his works.
Bach saw the first eleven fugues through the engraving process, but the remainder of the editorial work was done by his two eldest sons and the theorist Marpurg. The edition came out in 1751; by 1756 thirty copies had been sold and so C.P.E. Bach sold the plates of his father's last work for the value of the metal. The editors of this first edition made at least one palpable mistake by printing a variant of Fugue No. 10 as a separate fugue; Bach undoubtedly intended to discard this variant. Other questions arise to plague the editor and the performer. What part were the four long but not very interesting two-part canons to play in the entire scheme? Did Bach intend them for this work or for a projected Art of the Canon? Do the double-keyboard transcriptions of the two parts of Fugue No. 13 belong to the series, or did Bach intend them as practical realizations, virtuoso pieces to be performed rather than studied?
The most vexing problem, of course, is whether or not Bach intended the Art of the Fugue to be played at all. He does not once in the entire work indicate a tempo or a dynamic marking. He does not indicate what instrument or instruments should play the work. He writes each of the voices on a separate staff (in so-called "open score"), which is very helpful for the student but anything but helpful for the keyboard player.
This leaves the field open to the arranger, and arrangers have eagerly rushed in. There are multiple versions for orchestra, for siring quartet, for two pianos, for organ, for piano solo, for brass quintet, etc. Only the musical pedant can find these various realizations a source of annoyance; the genuine music lover will make his own choice or choices and take pleasure in the process. Whatever choice he makes, the Art of the Fugue remains massively and imperturbably itself. For though it is devoid neither of humanity nor emotion, the human and the emotional are not its real concern. Like the figures on Keats's urn, it has passed out of time and accident, and wears the changeless beauty of pure thought.