Updates, Live: Beyond B A C H

Gustav Nottebohm
no copyright infringement intended
(http://www.brahms-institut.de/web/bihl_digital/fotobestand/z/z_0695.html)

The last, unfinished fugue composed by Bach, Contrapunctus XIV: is it a fugue with three or four subjects? Both answers could be considered as true.

As it was left by Bach, Contrapunctus XIV has three subjects, and this is its title in the 1751 edition: Fuga a 3 soggetti. Only we should note that this title was given by Bach's son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, while in Bach's obituary it is mentioned a draft for a fugue intended to contain four subjects.

Contrapunctus XIV breaks off soon after the third subject (the famous B A C H) is announced. Were a fourth subject to continue the fugue, would it be any hint about it?

There is a hint: all Contrapuncti within the Art of Fugue use the same main subject. All but Contrapunctus XIV! Had Bach the intention to use the main subject as the coronation of his last fugue?

One of the first musicologists to try an answer was Gustav Nottebohm (a lifelong friend of Brahms and a keen scholar in the realm of Beethoven sketches).

Nottebohm published in 1881 an article where he made the case for Contrapunctus XIV as a quadruple fugue, with the main theme of the Art of Fugue as the forth subject remained undone. He also offered a completion of the work, as a proof of concept.

The ultimate demonstration for the quadruple fugue would be made much later, in the first decade of the 21th century, when Zoltán Göncz constructed the Permutation Matrix to produce the whole four sections of Contrapunctus XIV.

I tried to find the reconstruction of Contrapunctus XIV made by Nottebohm. I discovered it embedded within a section of a Passacaglia (based on the B A C H motif) created in 1993 by American composer Ron Nelson.

Here is how Ron Nelson describes his work (http://www.windrep.org/Passacaglia_%28Homage_on_B-A-C-H%29): a set of continuous variations in moderately slow triple meter built on an eight-measure melody (basso ostinato) which is stated, in various registers, twenty-five times... a seamless series of tableux which move from darkness to light... the textures of the B A C H motif are paraphrased (in an octatonic scale) in the fourth and fifth variations; the seventh variation incorporates Gustav Nottebohm’s resolution (altered) of the unfinished final fugue of The Art of Fugue; the melody from Bach’s Passacaglia in C minor appears once (also altered) in variation nineteen.