Late Bach: Counterpoint and Contemplation

About the composer

Bach spent the last decade of his life in Leipzig, formally a cantor and informally something more difficult to name. The bulk of his official duties — the weekly cantatas, the great Passions — were behind him. What he produced in those years was, almost without exception, music for nobody in particular: the Goldberg Variations, ostensibly for an insomniac count; the Musical Offering, a fugal puzzle for Frederick the Great; the unfinished Art of Fugue, which seems to have been written not for an instrument or an occasion but for the page itself. These pieces share a quality that is hard to describe and easy to feel: a kind of long, even attention, where a single subject is turned and re-turned until the listener forgets that anything else is supposed to happen.

The Mass in B minor sits awkwardly inside this group — it is a sacred work, formally Catholic, assembled by a Lutheran cantor who had no obvious use for it, and it was never performed in his lifetime. I include the Crucifixus here because it shows Bach doing the same thing as in the instrumental works: taking a fragment of material — in this case, a four-bar descending chromatic pattern — and walking around it long enough that it stops being a pattern and becomes a place.

Tracks

1. 1.Goldberg Variations BWV 988 — Aria4:32
2. 2.Goldberg Variations BWV 988 — Variatio 25, Adagio8:14
3. 3.The Art of Fugue BWV 1080 — Contrapunctus I3:12
4. 4.The Art of Fugue BWV 1080 — Contrapunctus IX, alla duodecima2:48
5. 5.The Art of Fugue BWV 1080 — Contrapunctus XI5:51
6. 6.Mass in B minor BWV 232 — Crucifixus3:18
7. 7.The Musical Offering BWV 1079 — Ricercar a 68:22
8. 8.Well-Tempered Clavier II BWV 875 — Prelude & Fugue in D minor4:46
9. 9.The Art of Fugue BWV 1080 — Contrapunctus XIV (unfinished)10:55

Notes

I put this together over the winter of 2023 because I had become impatient with my own listening — too much of it was happening in fifteen-minute increments while I made coffee. I wanted to sit down and listen to one thing for an hour without doing anything else, and I wanted that thing to be Bach, because Bach is the composer I most often think I know and most often discover I don't.

The sequencing is deliberate but not theoretical. The Aria opens because that is the natural first measure of the day. Variation 25 — the so-called "black pearl" — comes second because I wanted the long melancholy of it before the listener has settled in. The three pieces from the Art of Fugue in the middle are not in their published order; I have arranged them by what feels like ascending interior weight, with Contrapunctus XI as the centre of gravity. The Crucifixus follows because, after twelve minutes of pure four-voice writing, the entrance of the human voice is something close to a shock, and I wanted that shock to be felt.

Ricercar a 6 is the piece I argued with myself the longest about. It is a single fugue, six voices, and the recording I use is the one Bach himself laid out from the puzzle Frederick gave him — no embellishment, just the lines as written. It either works or it doesn't, and on most days it works. The Prelude and Fugue in D minor is here as a kind of release, because everyone needs a key change at minute forty.

The compilation closes with Contrapunctus XIV, which Bach did not finish. There is a moment, a little over nine minutes in, where the third subject — a transparent, four-note motif spelling out the letters of his own name in German notation — enters, and is then abandoned. The piece simply stops. I have heard recordings that try to fill in the missing pages from the sketches; I prefer the ones that do not. There is a particular silence that follows an unfinished fugue, and it is the silence I want this compilation to end on.

Recordings used

I am not going to list specific performers track by track because the right answer changes year to year. The Aria and Variation 25 in the version I most often play are from a 1981 Glenn Gould session, which is divisive but which I find honest. The Art of Fugue tracks rotate between Hewitt at the piano and Aimard at the harpsichord depending on the season. The B minor Crucifixus is Herreweghe; the Musical Offering is the Ensemble Sonnerie reading. Substitute as you like — the structure of the compilation will hold.

Why "collection.aac"

The original file on my desktop, before any of this was written down, was named collection.aac — the result of converting a stack of FLACs to AAC for a tiny old iPod I was using on commutes that year. The name stuck. I keep it here as a small reminder that almost everything on this site began as a personal artefact and only later became a public one.