Part I – Aren’t these the greatest performances of classical music? @ AskWoody (2024)

This week has turned out to be one for having really loong nights and this one is no exception.

So here I am incorporating not just a really long, but also one of the most amazing of all musical creations ever to be conceived in a human head: J.S. Bach’s very last work, many years in writing and still incomplete at the time of his death. Although there is disagreement on whether its creation was terminated by his death, or by Bach’s intention to have others continue it by writing their own contributions, so the whole thing might have been meant to be something for people to learn, practice playing and write contrapuntal music.

The music was written in “open score”, meaning that every voice in the 12 fugues and 2 cannons was written with the voices in separate, or “open” staves, as if every voice corresponded to a different instrument, although several could be played simultaneously on the same instrument, in particular one with a keyboard.

The very last fugue, for four voices, ends abruptly in the middle of a measure with the series of four notes (in German notation) BACH.

Whenever, precisely did Bach stop writing this work, whether deliberately, or because of dying, he actually did die in 1750, and the next year the whole work was tidied up by other musicians, because it had been left in obvious need of cleaning up and editing. And that is how it has come to us.

There are, as allowed by the open staves notation, many different interpretations, some for solo harpsichord, organ, or piano, and others for different kinds of musical ensembles.

This one is by the Academy Of St Martin In The Fields, with Sir Neville Marriner conducting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5FPC3nSn1E

On world history and listening to the “The Art of the Fugue”:

I remember, back in ’91, listening in the audience to an interpretation of this work by a small orchestra in the Matthias Church in the Buda side of Budapest, in Hungary. Towards the very end, the instruments went silent, one by one, and only the oboe continued, eerily alone and then stopped suddenly on the last note of that BACH sequence.

It was a time of heightened worries, of potential great danger, and also of great hope: it was a time when it was impossible not to be very emotional. And, perhaps because of this, that ending left many of us dabbing tears from our eyes. A moment in time, at a time of tremendous changes in the world around us with some of them very uncomfortably near us.

I had gone to visit Budapest in 1991 by ferry, along the Danube, after attending a large meeting on my specialty in Vienna, during the early days of Hungary’s newly gained independence from the Soviet Union and, while being there, occurred the coup by hard-line Cold-War throwback politicians and military officers that deposed the liberalizing “General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR”, Mikhail Gorbachev, carting away him and his wife Raisa to be imprisoned somewhere, it was rumored that in a dacha on the shores of the Black Sea.

I could follow the events happening in Moscow on the TV in my hotel room, because there was CNN there and in Hungary! And there was a McDonald’s in the very center of the city! And the former “Bookshop of the Friendship of the Marxist-Leninist Peoples” (this name written in German), also in the center of town, now had in its display no longer books on Dialectic Materialism, Social Revolution, or the Contradictions of Capitalism, but books on computers, on how to start your own business, on how to invest on stock and bonds and make money. So, while life was, on the surface, seemingly as it had been for a long time there, change was becoming obvious everywhere one looked. But also, deep down, there was a shared sinking feeling that any time now Soviet tanks might come, rumbling along the beautiful signature boulevards of the city, as they did in 1957, in early November, to squash flat the patriotic Hungarian Revolution that had started in June of that distant year.

And one day, when my stay was coming to its end in that beautiful city now so haunted by the tragic past, also at my hotel and on CNN, I saw the moment when the coup began to fail, followed no long after by the return of a haggard-looking Gorbachev with a shaken-looking Raisa by his side, he to be reinstated to his former position and, not much later, finding himself, again (but this time peacefully) out of power, be able to contemplate the final unraveling of the Soviet Union. This was the moment I witness thanks to CNN, as it happened: Boris Yeltsin, then the Major of Moscow, climbing on top of a tank that had been stopped by a civilian crowd when on its way to attack the Duma, the national Parliament, and so I saw Boris telling its crew and so letting it be known by the Soviet armed forces, the coup leaders now illegally commanding them, and the world at large, that the coup was doomed, it was all over, because the people were dead against it.

What he told the crew was: “Are you going to shoot at us? Or maybe you’d rather come over to our side and start defending the parliament?” And so they did and so it was. And the rest is history. So you probably already know what happened after that.