September 5: The Art of Fugue (Daniil Trifonov, piano)
An unnerving performance of a monumental work
As showtime approached for my first live performance hearing Bach’s Art of Fugue, I was hesitant to walk in the door.
This isn’t an essay about being intimidated by a piece of music. It was early March 2020 in New York City, and I arrived at the show coming from business meetings where I’d substituted arm-bumps for handshakes. I had a sinking feeling about what was about to happen to the world, and I knew in my gut that I should have stayed home.
The typical crowd at Alice Tully Hall is up there in age, and they always sound tubercular. But that night there was a certain unnerving ring to all the coughing. (The ring was that we we’re all about to die from a novel virus.) Anyway, ten days later, the world shut down, and Daniil Trifonov’s piano recital was the last music I heard performed for a few years.
Bach’s unfinished Art of Fugue is in some ways the endgame of counterpoint. It’s an hour and a half of theme and variations in D Minor. Phrases are layered, shuffled, and excavated until you think you’ve reached the abyss. You never do. At its best, the piece is immersive and trancelike, and for those reasons close listening can be exhausting, almost a trial. The Art of Fugue demands to be seen for its brilliance, and it can be too much to handle in a sitting (just like certain brilliant and demanding people).
I love the piece, but I don’t really like it.
Bach worked on Art of Fugue for a decade, and died in the middle of composing it. Here’s the autograph score, with Bach’s son Carl writing to note his father’s demise:
Performing music this dense requires a balance of concentration and mania, and Trifonov met the challenge, playing the monster from memory. The unease of potentially catching a horrible illness added to the concert’s already intense aura.
What a show, though. It was a gutsy, brawny, sweaty performance, very masculine and dominant and Russian. (This is the kind of heterodox writing that wins on Substack.) Trifonov was shaggy bearded and demon trance-like, his tight left-hand trills channeling guttural, angry birds. At times he was smashing through the keys while maintaining utmost control, drawing compelling music from what might otherwise have been an extended academic exercise.
At the conclusion of Trifonov’s own composed completion of the final, interrupted fugue, he segued directly into an adaptation of ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’, that was loud and driving and insistent in its beauty. It was as straightforward gorgeous as the Art of Fugue was dazzlingly confounding.
Trifonov recorded the Art of Fugue for Deutsche Grammophone, and the album includes the same segue into Jesu. Some of the physical passion of Trifonov was captured by the recording engineers, who seem to have mic’ed up each of his nostrils and Dolby Atmos’d them. Highly recommended for a rainy day!
Here are some highlights, though this work is best absorbed while following along with the score:
We don’t have any context without the opening theme, so here’s that:
Almost an R&B rhythm choice by Trifonov in Contrapuntus IV (0:07):
In Contrapuntus VII, the main theme is extended over twenty seconds, accompanied by a blizzard of ideas blowing in from all sides. Absolute galaxy brain. Trifonov is brilliant in these moments:
Again, so much happens here in Contrapuntus VIII. There are internal trills in conversation, repeated knocks on the door, lines from separate planets coming back to interweave. In some moments, Trifonov has one hand playing behind the beat and the other ahead. With all the phrases executed at different volumes, the playing feels orchestral:
A slinky recapitulation of the theme in the piano’s tenor voice in Contrapuntus IX:
In Contrapuntus X, we get a taste of the theme in a major mood:
The clip starts on the second bar of the score excerpt:
Skip to my Lou, in Contrapuntus XIII [Rectus]:
In the Contrapuntus XIII Canon alla Decima, it’s a whirligig:
For much, much more on Art of Fugue, check out a podcast devoted to the work, by friend of YoB Evan Shinners.
A little bonus Bach:
Another pianist famously closed a concert with a piano adaptation of ‘Jesu’: Dinu Lipatti. It was his final concert, which followed a long illness; it’s reported that he knew he was doomed, and decided to end his career with a piece he mastered in his youth. He died three months later at 33. If you don’t know this 1950 concert recording, do check it out, it’s incredible.
Here’s his Bach, an extraordinary three minutes:
It's sounds odd, but listening to TAOF was the first time I understood the idea of a fugue. In 1963 an a cappella jazz vocal octet from Paris, The Swingle Singers, put out an album of Bach preludes and fugues, sung exactly as written, usually in 4 parts, with the addition of bass and drums to give jazzy feel. Apparently they began singing short contrapuntal Bach pieces as a way to sharpen their pitch accuracy and improve their ensemble coordination. One of the tracks, Contrapunctus IX from TAOF made it onto the pop charts. I heard it on a pop music radio station that generally played groups like The Beach Boys, The Chiffons, and Bobby Vinton. I was electrified. Until then, my exposure to Bach had been limited to the short pieces that every beginning piano student studies, and I wasn't excited. But Contrapunctus IX, even though a double fugue, was perfectly clear to my 13-year old ears, because each line in the fugue was sung by a separate voice--the fugue's tenor line by the 2 tenors, etc. I instantly became a Bach devotee, and remain one to this day. When Ward Swingle, founder of the group, died a few years back, I wrote a note to the current members telling them that Contrapunctus IX had changed my life.
I will. Like you, I admire Bach, but don’t always like him. Sometimes the heavy things feel like a weight on my mind.