CPE Bach Ensemble / Hansjörg Albrecht

And for pianist Glenn Gould, there was no music that moved him more deeply than the last, unfinished fugue. Looking at the score, one cannot help but be amazed at the multitude of interwoven ideas. As one of the master’s late works, it remained unfinished. There are many rumors surrounding this as well. Did Bach fall ill while writing it? Did his eye condition prevent him from completing it? Couldn’t he have dictated the work to his workshop as he usually did? Or, as a new book by Meinolf Brüser proves, does The Art of Fugue follow in the tradition of vanitas painting, with Bach staging his own end here?

In reference to this art form, which expresses the finitude of human existence and shows humility before God, Bach deliberately ends The Art of Fugue in an incomplete state in the face of his own mortality—a sign of his awareness of the imperfection of his own compositional work. This thesis is also remarkable because The Art of Fugue is generally regarded as the conclusion of Bach’s polyphonic work, the perfection of which no one has yet been able to match.