Re: GG: David Blackwood: Fminor

[Brookemail <wbrooke@uniserve.com>]

    Quite late last night I found the book containing the description of
the Prelude and Fugue in F minor which I had previously referenced.
The book is titled "The Forty-Eight Preludes and Fugues of J.S. Bach,"
and is authored by a chap named Cecil Gray. It looks to be published in
1938. In any case, here are the goods:

(Begin excerpt, Page 45)

                                I. 12

       PRELUDE AND FUGUE (FOUR PARTS)
                            IN F MINOR

THE mood of this prelude is one of a deep but unobtrusive
melancholy, of sorrow uncomplainingly borne by a heroic
heart, of bitterness that is free from any resentment, of grief
without self-pitying eloquence. It has the mellowness, too,
of a wisdom that never spells disillusion, of a spirit so strong
that it need never be hard, so sensitive that it can never
become cynical--a philosopher-poet's melancholy that is
never brooding, but contemplates without flinching the
great riddles, the eternal problems, of life and death. There
is probably nothing else in music to which one could
compare the peculiar flavour of this particular piece. To
find its like one must turn to another art, to the mighty
humanism of that other German master, the sixteenth
-century wizard Albrecht D|rer, with his engraved
triptych of  St. Gerome, the Knight, Death and Demon,
and the Melancolia.


(End Excerpt)