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Over This Fugue the Author Died

Johann Sebastian Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge, The Art of Fugue, ends with a fugue that breaks off. In the autograph, his son Carl Philipp Emanuel wrote a note at that point. Ueber dieser Fuge, wo der Nahme BACH im Contrasubject angebracht worden, ist der Verfasser gestorben. Over this fugue, where the name BACH was placed in the countersubject, the author died. The first printed edition appeared in 1751. Its preface told buyers that the composer’s eye disease and death had kept him from finishing the work. The family added a chorale as compensation for the incomplete last fugue.

Scholars today consider it unlikely that Bach died while working on this fugue. The gap itself was never hidden.

Through All the Keys

Johann Sebastian Bach finished the first part of Das Wohltemperierte Klavier in 1722 and the second in 1740/42. The title page promises preludes and fugues durch alle Tone und Semitonia, through all tones and semitones, zum Nutzen und Gebrauch der Lehrbegierigen Musicalischen Jugend, for the use of young musicians eager to learn. Each part has 24 preludes and fugues, one pair for every major and minor key. In notes from his studies with the conductor Hans von Bülow, Theodor Pfeiffer records the sentence Das wohltemperirte Clavier ist das alte Testament, die Beethoven’schen Sonaten das neue, an beide müssen wir glauben. The Well-Tempered Clavier is the Old Testament, Beethoven’s sonatas the New, and we must believe in both.

The Christmas Oratorio

Johann Sebastian Bach’s Christmas Oratorio was first performed in Leipzig at six services between Christmas Day 1734 and Epiphany 1735. Many of its choruses and arias came from secular works he had written earlier. The opening chorus, for example, comes from a cantata performed on 8 December 1733 for the birthday of the Electress of Saxony. Reusing music in this way, the Parodieverfahren, was not unusual in Bach’s time. It was not a simple copy. Bach moved the pieces into other keys, changed the instruments and gave the new words a new musical meaning in several places.

New Paths

In October 1853 Robert Schumann published an article called Neue Bahnen, New Paths, in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, the journal he had co-founded in 1834. The article introduced a young composer: Er heißt Johannes Brahms, kam von Hamburg, dort in dunkler Stille schaffend. (His name is Johannes Brahms. He came from Hamburg, where he had been working in dark silence.) Schumann told his readers that Brahms had been trained by an excellent teacher and recommended to him by einem verehrten bekannten Meister, a respected and well-known master. Das ist ein Berufener, Schumann wrote. This is one who has been called. Brahms wrote to Schumann that he feared he could not meet the standards the public would now expect.

Three Books on How to Play

Within four years, three German musicians wrote down how to play their instruments. Johann Joachim Quantz published his method for the flute in Berlin in 1752. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach published his Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen, Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments, in Berlin in 1753. Leopold Mozart published his Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule, a thorough violin method, in Augsburg in 1756. In 1829 the composer Carl Friedrich Zelter wrote that Mozart’s method could be used solange die Violine eine Violine bleibt, as long as the violin remains a violin. Together, the three books are today the most important source on how music was performed in the middle of the 18th century.

The Grand Tattoo

The Großer Zapfenstreich, the grand tattoo, is the Bundeswehr’s ceremony to honor, among others, a departing chancellor or federal president. It was first performed in its present musical form in Berlin on 12 May 1838. The ceremony follows a fixed order: the march-in with the report, a serenade, the tattoo itself with the prayer and the national anthem, and the march-out. The music of the tattoo is fixed. The person being honored may choose the three pieces of the serenade. In 2021, Angela Merkel’s choices included Nina Hagen’s Du hast den Farbfilm vergessen.

One Formula for Seven Operas

Between 1977 and 2003, Karlheinz Stockhausen composed LICHT, light, a cycle of seven operas named after the days of the week. Together they last about 29 hours. The whole cycle is built on a single superformula of three melodies, one for each of the central characters, Michael, Eva and Luzifer. The formula defines the tonal centers and the durations of whole scenes. Each opera is composed from an elaborated form of its own day’s part of the formula.

Twenty-Six Years for the Ring

Richard Wagner began work on what became Der Ring des Nibelungen in 1848. He completed it in November 1874, twenty-six years later. The cycle had its premiere in 1876 in Bayreuth.

A Performance of 639 Years

In the Burchardi Church in Halberstadt, an organ is playing John Cage’s piece ORGAN²/ASLSP, as slow as possible. The performance began on 5 September 2001 with a pause. The first pipes sounded about two years later. The performance is planned to end in 2640, after 639 years. The length counts back to 1361, when Nicolaus Faber completed an organ for Halberstadt Cathedral. The years from 1361 to 2000 are 639. The sound changes on dates fixed in advance. The most recent change came on 5 August 2026, and the next is scheduled for 5 October 2027. The foundation that runs the project has no institutional funding and relies on donations.

A Song Against Plans

Die Dreigroschenoper, The Threepenny Opera, by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, opened on 31 August 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin. One of its songs is the Lied von der Unzulänglichkeit menschlichen Strebens, the song of the inadequacy of human striving. It is also listed under the title Ballade von der Unzulänglichkeit menschlichen Planens, the ballad of the inadequacy of human planning.