3 Poems on J.S. Bach's Last Fugue -- Notes

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In 1998 I received Vassar's W.K. Rose Fellowship for a multimedia project inspired by the last fugue of J.S. Bach's Art of the Fugue, known since its publication as Contrapunctus 14, a fugue on three subjects (or themes) including one using the Bach's own family name (where B in German nomenclature = Bb, and H = B natural). In addition to the intrinsic perfection and sublimity of the work, this final "unfinished" fugue attained special significance partly because of its truncated, near-complete state, trailing off, as it were, mid-stream. The romanticized version (popularized by Bach's own son and future publishers) perpetuated the scenario that Bach died having just completed the third theme (the one with his name built into the notes), but recent scholarship (cf. Christoff Wolff) persuades otherwise.   

My circular poem, "Harmonia Mundi," is a meditation both on Contrapunctus 14 (the unfinished or un-finishing fugue) as well as on some of its symbols, sources and historical context. In the first of four (planned) fugal themes, the notes form a slow palindrome in mostly long-held whole notes, and when inverted and flipped (as happens later in the piece), a series of cyclical, oddly static statements. Bach (and many composers from earlier generations whose "stile antico" he employs in this initial theme) saw music as a scientific means towards indexing the cosmos (specifically, the Aristotelian universe of an Unmoved Mover who generates all motion in those celestial and terrestrial bodies that strive for the godly perfection of a circle).   

The poem features nine rings (as in the ancient vision of the cosmos), and can be read cyclically (starting at each initial red letter) as well as across the boldface words from the center out. These boldface statements number four, the same number as voices in a fugue. Of course, with polyphonic music, one can read melodically (represented in the poem as reading in circles), or harmonically (vertically, whereby multiple lines create their own harmony, in this case, the vertical, boldface phrases).

The fugue comes down to us incomplete, and even if Bach had finished the fugue on a page that went missing, its abrupt cessation (e.g. when performing or listening to it) can feel like a musical "death" (with all the attendant sadness for those left behind facing the mystery as to what comes after, and the extinguishing of all potential). The silence after life and the silence beyond the final notes merge.

(Audio: The Incomplete Fugue (Contrapuntus XIV) performed by the viol consort, Phantasm, used with permission.)

-- John K. Stone