I was listening to the Gustav Leonhardt recording of The Art of the Fugue in the car for the last few days, and I kept on waiting for the unfinished fugue to show up. But it never did! Reading through the liner notes (what is the accepted term for CD booklets?), Leonhardt is of the opinion that the unfinished fugue wasn’t intended to become as part of the work. I hadn’t realized that there was any serious debate on this issue (though it is, I suspose, a bit suspicious that the main theme of the work doesn’t appear in the portion of that fugue that we have); at any rate, I miss it.
Not my favorite recording of The Art of the Fugue; it seems a bit flat to me. (Flat in the sense of “insufficiently textured”, not in the musical sense, of course.) The other recordings on the CD are better, though (Clavierubung II and Prelude, Fugue, and Allegro BWV 998). I’m looking for more recordings of The Art of the Fugue; the other ones I have are the ones by Davitt Moroney (which I quite like) and the partial recording by Glenn Gould, largely on organ, which is dreadful. (At least the organ parts.) Anybody with any favorites?
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There’s an old recording of the Art of the Fugue with Hermann Scherchen and a group of chamber players that I remember liking. Not sure how to find it now, but http://www.henrysrecords.org/ might reveal more information.
9/17/2004 @ 8:25 pm
[…] A followup to an old post of mine: I was just reading the liner notes to the Davitt Moroney recording of The Art of the Fugue, and it seems that there is good historical evidence that the unfinished fugue was, indeed, intended to be part of the work. Which makes me happy: it would feel wrong to me for as stunning a fugue as that one to not be part of a larger work. […]
2/2/2006 @ 9:49 pm