J. S. BACH Jonathan Berkahn - Victoria University - Victoria ...

as such—at times even creating their own from scratch. There exists no ‘conjectural
completion’ to Coleridge’s ‘Khubla Khan’. Da Vinci’s sketch of the Virgin and Child
with the infant John the Baptist and St. Anne remains a sketch. The self-evident
incompleteness of these examples has not prevented them from becoming iconic
works of art. Within the visual and literary arts a torso (literal or metaphorical) can be
accepted as it stands. Half a picture is still a picture, a literary fragment can be enjoyed
as such; but an incomplete musical movement is no piece at all. 6 It is possible to
conclude a performance of (say) die Kunst der Fuge at the point Bach reached before
he died—devastatingly effective, even—but to do so is to radically subvert the ethos of
the concert room. 7 The intrusion of a biographical fact (for such it is, however
pertinent) into the hermetic world of the musical structure is nothing less than a
catastrophe within the context of that world and the conventions of musical
performance. To thus ‘play safe’ in relation to the composer’s presumed intentions is,
paradoxically, the surest way to frustrate them. Whatever Bach may have planned for
the rest of the movement, he certainly didn’t intend for it to stop dead at bar 239: 8
Johann Sebastian Bach once came into a large company while a musical amateur was sitting and
improvising at a harpsichord. The moment the latter became aware of the presence of the great
master, he sprang up and left off with a dissonant chord. Bach, who heard it, was so offended by this
musical unpleasantness that he passed right by his host, who was coming to meet him, rushed to the
harpsichord, resolved the dissonant chord, and made an appropriate cadence. Only then did he
approach his host and make him his bow of greeting. 9
6 Cf Konrad, Fragmente, p.xv.
7 One might compare the way that Toscanini halted the première of Turandot at the point Puccini had
reached before he died: ‘Qui finisce l’opera, perché a questo punto il maestro è morto.’ Alfano’s
completion was only used from the second performance onward.
8 Although Walter Corten has argued just this in ‘La dernière fugue: Pièce inachevé ou ouverture sur
l’infini?’ (Analyse musicale 11 (April 1988) 61-65), and ‘Clefs numériques dans L’art de la fugue de
J. S. Bach?’ (Belgisch tijdschrift voor muziekwetenschap/Revue belge de musicologie 42 (1988)
199-221, on numerological grounds. Such an argument is surely anachronistic, transplanting
twentieth-century ideas of the musical work as text (see below) into the eighteenth century.
9 Anecdote from J. F. Reichardt’s Musikalischer Almanach; in The Bach reader, p.290.
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