Word: bache
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...chief offering was the entire set of six Schubler Chorales, very rarely performed at one sitting. Written toward the end of Bach's life, they were transcriptions of six cantata movements (and one of only three sets of pieces to get into print during the composer's lifetime). All the same, they are, entrusted to the proper facile fingers and fleet feet, magnificently suited to the organ--Schweitzer notwithstanding...
...framed the chorale set with two unhackneyed examples of the favorite Baroque practice of juxtaposing a free and a strict form: the Fantasia and Fugue in C Minor and the Prelude and Fugue in B Minor. The latter fugue is a fine specimen of the many Bach fugues that are first-rate works wrought from an unpromising theme. Bach disproved the maxim, Ex nihilo nihil...
...next day a huge crowd turned up at Christ Church to hear its organist, Marion Boron, try to play Bach's Art of Fugue, or most of it. This performance was intended to illustrate her 1959 "discovery" of the symbolic intent behind this work, which she has described in a recently published monograph...
Miss Boron will be disappointed if she expects her addled theory to have the impact Hans David's did when he hit on a solution to the structure of Bach's Musical Offering. Her "dramatic exegesis" is so demonstrably absurd on dozens of grounds that there is no point in embarking on a full-scale refutation here (or anywhere...
...Would the world's greatest religious composer have spent his last days writing mere fugal exercises?" she asks. Her contention, briefly, is that The Art of Fugue "is Bach's story of the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus and the salvation of mankind; including his own personal salvation in the final fugue. When he reached this point, the plan was too stupendous, even the master could not complete it." (No plan would have been too stupendous for Bach; but let's not go into that...