Word: bache
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...Bach left us 19 pieces in this work, the last one incomplete. "The hidden key," Miss Boron says, "is in the number of four-part fugues." She claims Bach intended "these 14 fugues to correspond with the 14 Stations of the Cross," and blithely remarks that "the remaining fugues do not belong in the final version of The Art of Fugue...
...however, she counts the upright and inverted versions of one of the 19 as two; and she includes one that is a three-part fugue! I wonder what her reaction will be if she ever learns that Bach planned to write a 20th piece--another four-voice fugue on four themes, which was then to be inverted note for note in all four parts...
...Bach lived, Miss Boron maintains, he intended to have 14 fugues each preceded by a canon "in the manner of meditations or commentary on each Station"--with canon 1 at the unison, canon 2 at the second, etc. (a scheme Bach did in fact employ in the Goldberg Variations). But of the four canons Bach did write (omitted in this performance), one is by augmentation in contrary motion, which already upsets her numerical scheme...
...When Bach worked a theme on the letters of his name into the unfinished Piece 19 (alias Jesus Laid in the Sepulcher), I half expected Miss Boron to claim that the interruption was Bach's way of paraphrasing Shakespeare's Antony, "My heart is in the coffin there with Jesus, and I must pause till it come back...
...compensate for the lack of an ending, an extraneous chorale-prelude, "Vor deinen Thron," was appended when The Art of Fugue was published after Bach's death. But Miss Boron states that it is "a significantly integral part of The Art of Fugue," although the chorale is in the key of G and all the other pieces...