Title: Die Kunst der Fuge: Contrapuncuts XIV (H. Walcha)
Description: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) DIE KUNST DER FUGE BWV 1080 Fuga a 3 Soggetti (Contrapunctus XIV) Helmut Walcha, orgel der St. Laurenskerk, Alkmaar "Contrapunctus XIV breaks off abruptly in the middle of the third section at the 239th measure. The autograph carries a note in the handwriting of Bach's son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach saying Über dieser Fuge, wo der Nahme B A C H im Contrasubject angebracht worden, ist der Verfasser gestorben. (At the point where the composer introduces the name BACH in the countersubject to this fugue, the composer died.) However, modern scholarship disputes this version, in particular because the musical notes are indisputably in Bach's own hand, written in a time before his deteriorating vision led to erratic handwriting, probably 17481749. In Glenn Gould's recording, the music deliberately stopped at full volume on the first beat of bar 233, the end of the 1751 print edition; the manuscript continues until the first beat of bar 239 and the tenor voice until the end of that bar. Most performers add these bars, and execute a fade out on the last few notes. Many scholars, including Gustav Nottebohm (1881), Wolff and Davitt Moroney, have argued that the piece was intended to be a quadruple fugue, with the opening theme of Contrapunctus I to be introduced as the fourth subject. The title Fuga a 3 soggetti, in Italian rather than Latin, was not given by the composer but by CPE Bach, and Bach's Obituary actually makes mention of a draft for a fugue that was to contain four themes in four voices. The combination of all four themes would bring the entire work to a fitting climax. Wolff also suspected that Bach may have finished the fugue on a lost page, called fragment X by him, on which the composer attempted to work out the counterpoint between the four subjects. A number of musicians and musicologists have conjectured completions of Contrapunctus XIV, notably music theoretician Hugo Riemann, musicologist Donald Tovey, organists Helmut Walcha and Lionel Rogg, and Davitt Moroney. Ferruccio Busoni's Fantasia Contrappuntistica is based on Contrapunctus XIV, but is more a work by Busoni than by Bach. In 2007, New Zealand organist and conductor Indra Hughes completed a doctoral thesis about the unfinished ending of Contrapunctus 14, proposing that the work was left unfinished not because Bach died, but as a deliberate choice by Bach to encourage independent efforts at a completion. Douglas Hofstadter's book Gödel, Escher, Bach discussed the unfinished fugue and Bach's supposed death during composition as an illustration of the Church-Turing Thesis, specifically the notion that logical systems can be made to "destroy themselves" by proving contradictions in their own rules." (Source: Wiki) Others notable recordings: http://it.youtube.com/watch?v=OJGTiZFr7Tg http://it.youtube.com/watch?v=iDSAXtsDB5k&feature=related and http://it.youtube.com/watch?v=2vacZrMF32Y&feature=related http://it.youtube.com/watch?v=JbM3VTIvOBk&feature=related http://it.youtube.com/watch?v=g2swVtqsXjo