Johann Sebastian Bach: 300th Anniversary Celebration University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 2 February 1985

Abstract

ly, was intended almost certainly for performance on the harpsichord.4 Furthermore, from a detailed analysis of the source materials it was determined that a major part of the of Fugue did not date from the period preceding death. An earlier version, of which a complete autograph survives in keyboard score (as opposed to the open score of the posthumous edition) was finished during the early 1740s. During his last year, while preparing the work for publication, Bach did decide to revise it. The revisions included a drastic change in the ordering of the pieces and the addition of five new numbers to the original fourteen. According to Wolff, the change in order reflected a change in conception of the work, from an Art of Counterpoint to an Art of Fugue'-the ordering of the revised version being according to fugal rather than according to contrapuntal categories. Wolff's most dramatic contribution probably was his ingenious and convincing argument to demonstrate that in all likelihood Bach had completed the entire revision of the of Fugue in manuscript when he died, and that the apparent incompleteness resulted from the failure of the posthumous editors to interpret correctly the composer's intentions with regard to the surviving materials (they also botched their editing job in several other respects). Perhaps the knowledge that the of Fugue was in fact completed by the composer will compensate for having to relinquish the romantic story of his last, sadly interrupted musical effort.5 4See Heinrich Husmann, Die 'Kunst der Fuge' als Klavierwerk: Besetzung und Anordnung, Bach-Jahrbuch XXXV (1938), 1-61, and Gustav M. Leonhardt, 'The of Fugue', Last Harpsichord Work: An Argument (Martinus Nijhoff, the Hague, 1952). 5This revised compositional history of the of Fugue, including Wolff's theory on the unfinished fugue, was descibed in Christoph Wolff et al., Bach's of Fugue: An Examination of the Sources, Current Musicology XIX (1975), 47-77. 118 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.94 on Sat, 21 May 2016 06:04:04 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms