Re: GG: (Art of Fugue - Rosen)

[Bradley P Lehman <bpl@umich.edu>]

On Sun, 21 Sep 1997, K. Berry wrote:

>     maybe also a cadenza toward the end of Contrapunctus I.  And there's also
> 
> A cadenza in Cp. 1?!  Not to expose my ignorance, but where?  Surely not
> those long poignant rests ... ?

I too prefer to leave the rests as they are, but Leonhardt and some others
add short lead-ins there. 

>     the issue of what to do at the end of the last big fugue...
> 
> For friends or oneself, I like the idea of improvising a completion :-).
> I think that's several lifetimes away for me :-).  In an academic
> setting, I can imagine playing different completions for purposes of
> comparison and discussing.  But for a recording or concert, I can't
> imagine doing anything but breaking off -- perhaps partly because that's
> how I first heard/saw it, in the Gould/Monsaingeon video.  It seems so
> much stronger to me than anything else.  In a way I'm glad Bach's
> completion (``Fragment X'' as Christian Wolff called it) was lost; how
> can any concrete ending be as powerful as that abrupt termination?

Lionel Rogg and Helmut Walcha each recorded their own completions on
organ; Davitt Moroney on his harpsichord set has two versions (one without
any completion, one with his own completion as also published in his
edition).  I don't remember offhand who all has recorded Tovey's
completion, if anyone.  The Erich Bergel organ completion was published on
a tape along with the book that contained it (I got it from the University
of Michigan library).  I rearranged the Bergel version to make it playable
on harpsichord, and played that when I did the whole thing as a grad 
school project in 1992.  

By the way, it's Christoph Wolff, not Christian.

The trouble with the way GG breaks it off, as I've mentioned elsewhere, is
that in doing so he actually *adds* two notes (A-F) that aren't in the
piece at that point. 

> 
>     stop where Bach did in the print, or stop where Bach did in the
>     earlier manuscript (farther than the print)
> 
> I thought it was pretty well accepted to stop where B-A-C-H comes in as
> the countersubject?  No?  I'm not up on all the maneuverings.
> 

No, the B-A-C-H comes in at least a whole page before the break-off point. 
When GG gets to that B-A-C-H, he suddenly slows down the piece even more,
before getting it rolling again. 

> 
> BTW, Bradley, are any of your renditions available as recordings?  I
> searched in a few places but couldn't find any.

I haven't done a commercial recording; all I have are concert tapes from
92 and 95.  Y'know, turn on a cassette machine and get an informal
recording of the whole concert.  In 92, as I mentioned above, I did the
Bergel completion.  Took an intermission after Contrapunctus XI to give
both the audience and myself a rest, then went back for the mirrors and
the canons and the big one.  I'd spent an entire semester researching
different aspects of the piece, working on playing it, trying different
completions, writing analysis papers, studying performance history,
studying other arrangements, writing program notes, etc.  That was an
exhilarating term, designing an independent-study project on all these
aspects of the piece, and then playing it. 

In 95 a CD shop engaged me to play the Art of Fugue for an evening concert
in the shop...but they mistakenly advertised it for 6:00 and 8:00.  So we
agreed that I should play it at both times, taking a rest in between. 
With that in mind, I cut the four-voiced mirror fugues but played the
three-voiced ones; cut all the canons (except used one of them as an
encore); and broke off the final fugue at the manuscript point. 
Expediency, having to play the piece twice in one evening: the mirror
fugues and the Bergel completion are very difficult to work up without a
huge amount of preparation time, and I wanted a long enough rest break
between the shows (quick supper in the back room, and checking the
tuning).  And one of the canons requires a second manual for the voice
crossings, but the harpsichord I used that evening had only one, so I cut
them.  Those mirror fugues seem to require luck to pull off...no matter
how much preparation, they seem especially prone to potential slips at the
moment, in part because they require strange and sudden wrist and finger
motions.  I wasn't sure I'd be lucky enough to get all the way through all
of them twice in one evening! 

Surprisingly, the second show went even better than the first one.  I'd
thought I would be tired, but it actually worked the opposite way, the
first one giving a "high" that carried through into the second.  In the
first one I had to conserve energy a bit for the long haul, but in the
second I could relax more and take more chances. 

It's a tough piece in which to relax the mind while playing, because
there's so much happening at once...relax the concentration too much, and
whoosh there it goes.  It really does bring some kind of altered state, I
think.  Hard to describe.  Also, if the canons are included in the
play-through, it's a surprisingly large mental shift to suddenly be
dealing with only two voices, after controlling four for an hour.  Another
interesting mental thing, also hard to describe, is that each play-through
reveals different details as the piece goes along.  There's so much to pay
attention to, that parts of it are necessarily going on in the background
at all times, being handled in the subconscious...but it's *different*
parts from the previous time. 

Bradley Lehman ~ Harrisonburg VA, USA ~ 38.44N+78.87W
bpl@umich.edu ~ http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl/