I. The Craftsman of Leipzig

Johann Sebastian Bach does not quite fit the portrait later ages prepared for the “great artist.”

Set aside Beethoven’s fury, Mozart’s child-prodigy halo, Wagner’s self-mythology. Look first at a craftsman: the Thomaskantor at Leipzig’s St Thomas School, also responsible for music in the city’s principal churches.

What did the job involve? Preparing music for Sundays and feast days, rehearsing schoolboys, teaching music, coordinating players and the copying of parts, attending to school and church business. The position included Latin teaching, which he arranged for others to undertake. There were disputes with municipal and school authorities over money, staffing, and the appointment of choir prefects. Behind the music stood many unmusical matters.

He worked in Leipzig from 1723 until his death in 1750: twenty-seven years. Especially during the early years, new cantatas followed close on the heels of the church calendar; later programs also used revivals, adaptations, and other composers’ works. Service after service approached, and the music had to be ready. Add Passions, masses, organ and keyboard music, chamber and orchestral works: more than a thousand compositions have come down to us.

Behind that number was no room sealed off from ordinary life. In two marriages he fathered twenty children; ten reached adulthood. Raising a family and grieving losses, training pupils, arguing over administration: these belonged to the same life as composition. Family members, pupils, and performers helped copy and rehearse the music that would turn paper into sound.

Inspiration was not absent. But if we see only its flame, we miss the delivery date. This Sunday the music must sound. Next Sunday, again. Talent found its voice through repeated work.

An earlier essay presented Du Fu as a poet responding to the pressures of reality. Bach, too, was not simply carved into shape by deadlines. He took up the chisel and built with his own hands. He worked under pressure and made the conditions of work into material. Not a tireless machine: a person who kept doing the work.

II. Fugue

One way toward Bach is to learn to listen to a fugue.

A fugue does not assign one fixed melody the lead and everything else the background. Several voices retain their own lines while pursuing and interweaving with one another. Voices may be sung or played; at a keyboard, two hands can set several lines walking at once.

Listen to a common beginning.

The first voice states a subject, often only a few measures long. In this series’ vocabulary, that is construction: a unit of sound with which further work can be done.

A second voice enters with an answer, generally at the dominant, often a fifth higher or fourth lower, sometimes with intervals adjusted to preserve the tonal relationship. It is not simply a high melody moved into a low register. The line seems to return from another direction: recognizable, differently placed.

Meanwhile the first voice continues, forming counterpoint with the second. Each has a direction; their vertical encounters include consonance, dissonance, and resolution. Musical order need not abolish tension. It lets tension move.

A third voice enters; in a four-voice fugue, a fourth follows. The lines bring in the subject successively, then return to it in different keys, registers, and combinations.

An upward motion turned downward is inversion. Lengthened note values make augmentation; shortened ones, diminution. In contrapuntal writing more broadly, note order can also be reversed: retrograde. These are available techniques, not a compulsory checklist for every fugue. A starting point is repeatedly reshaped, and the listener recognizes its traces.

This essay would like to hear a cycle of carving and construction here.

The subject is construction: a building unit that provisionally stands.
Transformation is carving: questioning and reshaping what already has a form.
The tension between voices suggests remainder, something no single line lets us hear completely. Counterpoint is the musical term; remainder is our philosophical metaphor.

A fugue need not add voices without end. It sends a finite set of lines away and brings them back, crosses them, alternates statements and episodes. Several directions can coexist, making a whole that no voice possesses alone.

Emergence. Not one melody swallowing all the others, but their relationships bringing something new into being.

This recalls Newton: a small set of laws opens a broad physical description; a small amount of musical material opens complex relations in sound. They are not the same kind of demonstration, but their ways of building can illuminate one another.

III. The Well-Tempered Clavier

Das Wohltemperierte Clavier, The Well-Tempered Clavier, is among Bach’s best-known keyboard collections. Two books, each containing twenty-four pairs of preludes and fugues, traversing twelve major and twelve minor keys.

Twenty-four keys, from C major to B minor. A prelude and a fugue for each. Not a map of all the world’s music, but twenty-four doors in the major–minor system, each opened in turn.

Several tuning practices coexisted. Some favored common keys but left harsh intervals in more remote ones; temperaments accommodating all keys widened the road. “Well-tempered” cannot simply be equated with modern equal temperament, and Bach’s precise preferred arrangement remains unsettled.

The score nevertheless gives us something audible: no key lies unused within this collection. Every pair receives its own development. On the first book’s title page, Bach also names the learner’s study and the accomplished player’s enjoyment. Teaching and artistry do not live in separate rooms.

Listening, this essay recalls the commitment at the heart of the series: a subject is an end, not merely a means.

A key is not a person and acquires no ethical standing by analogy. Yet, as a way of hearing, we can stop treating a key as nothing but a corridor toward another. C major need not push F-sharp minor to the margins. Each has a beauty that can unfold.

Call this a musical “kingdom of ends,” and the image belongs to the listener, not to a proof Bach supplied for Kant. What we hear is the possibility of making room for different voices.

IV. God

Two abbreviations appear on a number of Bach’s manuscripts.

“J.J.”—Jesu Juva: Jesus, help me.
“S.D.G.”—Soli Deo Gloria: glory to God alone.

They place work within the direction of faith. Bach composed within Lutheran worship, and also for courts, cities, pupils, and concerts. To work for God need not mean that listeners and neighbors are absent.

This adds a distinct posture to the figures in our series.

If we briefly draw silhouettes: Socrates guards the question, Kant appeals to reason, Nietzsche pursues self-overcoming, Shakyamuni points toward liberation. None of these silhouettes contains the whole of a person’s thought or faith.

Bach writes on the score where the glory belongs.

Following that gesture, we can imagine him not having to regard himself as music’s sole origin. Labor might be receiving and responding: a craftsman bends over the page, bringing to it something of a greater order in which he believes. That is this essay’s reading, not a recorded interior monologue.

We need not share his faith to understand how such a direction might sustain daily labor. It cannot by itself explain a thousand works, nor guarantee that a person never tires.

To treat every act of creation as the self’s solitary duty to produce a world can be a heavy burden.
To place oneself within a relationship larger than oneself can sometimes renew strength.
This is a possibility, not a prescription that exempts believers from exhaustion or condemns unbelievers to it.

In his later years Bach’s sight seriously deteriorated; after eye operations in 1750, his health worsened further. A posthumous publication tells a moving story of the blind composer dictating a chorale prelude. Later retellings place his son-in-law at the deathbed on the day he died. Surviving scores and their relationships do not establish that whole scene. The work associated with Before Your Throne I Now Appear also has roots in earlier music.

Even without making the tradition a transcript, the Bach who continued revising and gathering works in old age can echo Beethoven writing the Ninth after losing his hearing. Bodily difficulty did not erase the work’s traces. That is not a demand that everyone living with illness must go on creating.

V. B-A-C-H

The Art of Fugue was one of Bach’s great late projects, not an unambiguously identifiable “last composition.”

A plain D-minor subject supports a succession of fugues and canons. Inversion, augmentation, diminution, combinations of two subjects and three: complexity grows layer by layer from limited material. The work explores the possibilities of fugue deeply; it need not exhaust every possibility to be a culmination.

The voices are written on separate staves, without an explicit performing ensemble for the whole collection. There is a strong case for keyboard performance; later musicians have also made many ensemble arrangements. Abstraction on the page does not dispense with bodies and instruments. Rather, under changing timbres, the relationships remain discernible, like a building standing in different light.

The unfinished fugue commonly called Contrapunctus XIV successively presents three subjects in its surviving portion, then begins to combine them. The third brings its composer’s name into the music.

In German note names, B means B-flat, A means A, C means C, and H means B-natural. B-A-C-H. Four notes: both a name and material that can pass between voices.

The name enters at measure 193. The music does not stop immediately. It moves onward, until the manuscript breaks off at measure 239.

A note on the manuscript, usually attributed to his son Carl Philipp Emanuel, says in substance that the composer died while working on this fugue in which B-A-C-H appears as a countersubject. The annotation connects the piece with death. It does not give us a witnessed instant when writing the name caused the hand to stop.

Why does the break remain? Researchers offer different explanations: composition left incomplete, or later material that has not survived? Others have supplied endings. Some performances use completions; others stop at the break. Knowing this need not make the arriving silence any lighter.

To think of Gödel here is this essay’s association, not a second demonstration of incompleteness in music.

Gödel’s theorems concern formal systems satisfying particular conditions. Encoding a name as notes is not the same as expressing a statement about a formal system within that system, nor does it trigger a law requiring music to stop. Yet a listener can still feel this: the builder’s name sounds inside the building, while the pages do not deliver the whole building into our hands.

Bach died on 28 July 1750. The ending of a life and the break in a score have become superimposed in later reading. Not one documented instant, but a powerful resonance.

Zhuangzi tells of Hundun dying when the seventh opening is bored. Set that fable beside the fugue, not to claim that Bach killed his music by carving in his name, but to ask again: when we try to arrange everything within a construction, what remains beyond it?

“No construction can close upon everything” can remain a question here. The music remains too. It did not die from incompleteness. The name has sounded; the voices still draw the ear onward. The page has reached its edge. The listener has not.

VI. Forgotten?

After Bach’s death, he did not disappear from everybody’s memory.

European taste moved toward new styles, toward the age of Haydn and Mozart, and some of Bach’s music seemed old and elaborate. Sons including Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christian gained fame. Their father’s keyboard and organ works and contrapuntal craft nevertheless continued through pupils, family, collectors, and composers.

Manuscripts were dispersed, and many works were indeed lost. Later stories even described scores treated as waste paper or used to wrap meat. That painful image cannot replace a history tracing individual sources: some pages vanished; others were carefully preserved, copied, and practiced.

In Berlin in 1829, twenty-year-old Felix Mendelssohn conducted a landmark public revival of the St Matthew Passion, in a version with cuts and alterations. Nearly eighty years had passed since Bach’s death. An older church work entered a new concert culture, before a changed audience.

The performance became a milestone of the Bach revival. It did not retrieve someone from absolute oblivion; it brought an existing tradition before a much larger public.

Performances, publications, and scholarship expanded. Bach became one of the most admired composers in Western music. Scores once shared within smaller circles began to enter many more people’s lives.

From relative retreat into specialist circles toward a wider public canon: a less straight road than forgetting, discovery, canonization.

It recalls Du Fu without duplicating his chronology. Du Fu was already highly praised by Yuan Zhen and others in the Tang; the Song made him a still more widely followed exemplar. Understanding during his lifetime, transmission after death, and later admiration slowly accumulated.

Both reputations continued to be rewritten after death. Later readers called Du Fu the Poet Sage; admirers gave Bach titles such as Father of Music. But the laurels should not conceal the craftsman’s hands: one revising verse, one weaving voices, both already finding some understanding in their own time.

Why do certain works need longer to reach more listeners? This essay considers density. Counterpoint is woven into melody; autumn grief, distance, long wandering, age, illness, solitude can crowd into Du Fu’s couplet: “Far from home, grieving in autumn, always a traveler; / old and often ill, I climb the height alone.” Complexity does not exclude emotion. Emotion lives in the layers of relationship.

Density can require listening and reading again. It also needs teachers, performers, copyists, publishers who leave an encounter available to the next generation. Time does not automatically award genius its prize. Someone must turn back for the work to sound again.

VII. Two Universes

Newton’s and Bach’s lives overlapped for more than forty years. Newton was born in 1643 by the modern calendar, Bach in 1685; when Newton died, Bach was still working in Leipzig.

One, in England, used mathematics to build explanations of the physical world. The other, in the German lands, used notes to build a world we can hear.

Place them together to examine a shared ambition, not to declare their work identical.

From laws of motion and gravitation, Newton brought many earthly and celestial motions into one description.
From subjects and contrapuntal techniques, Bach developed complex relations among voices out of simple material.

Newton’s starting principles were concise; their explanatory reach was broad.
Bach’s material could be small; its unfolding could be extraordinarily rich.

Both show that rules need not merely constrain: they can open complexity. But mathematical models must answer to experience; a composition’s value is not judged by predicting how an apple falls.

Thinking of Newton, we watch planets orbit, apples fall, comets return.
Listening to Bach, we follow voices interweaving, subjects changing, tensions forming and resolving.

Relativity later defined limits for Newton’s theory, which remains an effective approximation under appropriate conditions. The Art of Fugue is not a hypothesis awaiting replacement by the next physical theory. Later music can find other paths, criticize, rework, and perform Bach anew without turning his work into an answer refuted by experiment.

That does not make Bach more eternal than Newton, or art immune to judgment. Scientific explanations and artworks continue living in different ways. One universe helps us describe what we see; another invites us to listen again.

VIII. To God Alone the Glory

At this series’ imagined bridgehead, another figure arrives. An eighteenth-century black coat, a wig, a stack of music in his hands. For a moment he does not look at the others. He looks at the score.

He is quiet in this picture, answering the stillness of Darwin bending to observe nearby. For a moment, daily disputes have receded. He is listening: to relationships between voices, transformations of subjects, counterpoint.

What brought him here was not only some moment of inspiration. It was also all those Sundays, rehearsals, copied parts, revisions. Deadlines were a chisel; choosing how to work was the movement of his own hand.

Here he has built a universe. In notes, in counterpoint, in fugue.

It has exacting structures, and breaths that performers take anew each time. Open The Art of Fugue: it is still there. Not every edition or performance has only one correct place for every choice. Rather, the voices can still draw us into an encounter at once rigorous and alive.

Then comes the fugue that has not reached us complete. B-A-C-H has already sounded. The music reaches measure 239. If the performer chooses not to supply a continuation, the sound stops here.

Soli Deo Gloria. To God alone the glory.

The builder is gone. The building remains. For those who pause here to listen, silence too enters the world the work has left.

Notes

1. For the Leipzig post, cantata cycles, the 1730 appeal for resources, and his final years, see the Bach Archive chronology. Providing weekly church music did not mean writing a new cantata every week for twenty-seven years: revival and revision were part of the work. “More than a thousand” conveys scale, not a claim that every catalogue number is a unique, uncontroversially attributed new composition.

2. The fugue account offers a listening route, not a fixed form. Voice numbers, answers, episodes, and transformations vary. Counterpoint accommodates stylistically organized dissonance. Retrograde belongs to the wider contrapuntal repertoire and should not be confused with the mirror inversions in The Art of Fugue.

3. Each Well-Tempered Clavier book contains twenty-four pairs, forty-eight pairs in total. The first book’s title page gives 1722 and identifies educational and recreational uses; the second book developed later. Well temperament is not simply equal temperament. Keys, voices, and the subject-as-end are compared metaphorically, not by granting notes ethical personhood.

4. J.J. and S.D.G. are religious inscriptions found on some manuscripts, not a fixed feature of all of them. Faith may orient work without proving that a composer never tired or that unbelief entails exhaustion. The brief portraits of Socrates, Kant, Nietzsche, and the Buddha are silhouettes within this essay.

5. BWV 668 has a complex relationship with the chorale version appended to the 1751 Art of Fugue print. The publishers supplied the chorale to compensate for incompleteness and transmitted a story of the blind Bach dictating to a friend. The Leipzig chorale manuscript’s BWV 668 is in an unidentified hand; his son-in-law Altnickol copied the preceding BWV 666 and 667. This does not establish dictation to the son-in-law on the day of death. Eye disease, operations, and posthumous narratives do not license a modern medical diagnosis here.

6. The Art of Fugue manuscripts, 1751/1752 print, and modern orderings differ. The incomplete fugue is often numbered Contrapunctus XIV; the original print calls it Fuga a 3 Soggetti. B-A-C-H enters at measure 193; the manuscript stops at 239. The collection’s main D-minor subject has not appeared in the surviving portion. Completions often introduce it, demonstrating a musical possibility rather than recovering a lost Bach manuscript.

7. The closing manuscript annotation is usually attributed to C.P.E. Bach. It does not establish that the composer died while writing measure 239. The juxtaposition of signature, self-reference, Zhuangzi, and Gödel is literary. Under the relevant conditions, Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem restricts a formal system’s proof of its own consistency; it predicts neither a musical interruption nor a verdict on a life.

8. The Berlin revival of the St Matthew Passion in 1829 is a reception-history turning point, not evidence that nobody transmitted Bach’s music for eighty years. Meat-wrapping stories remain later traditions, not verified provenance for particular manuscripts. Yuan Zhen’s epitaph documents Tang admiration for Du Fu. The Newton comparison and bridgehead meeting are this essay’s constructions; the final silence belongs to a particular performance and listening experience, not a claim that Bach intended incompletion as completion.

Sources and further reading: Bach Archive Leipzig: biographical chronology · Bach Archive Leipzig: transmission and cataloguing of the works · Netherlands Bach Society: The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080 · Netherlands Bach Society: chorale prelude BWV 668 · Netherlands Bach Society: The Well-Tempered Clavier and BWV 862 · Henle: preface to the critical edition of The Art of Fugue · Lyrebird Music: Art of Fugue editorial introduction and critical notes · Library of Congress: John Moran’s concert notes, including manuscript religious inscriptions · Journal of New Music Research: a corpus study of tuning in The Well-Tempered Clavier · Yuan Zhen: epitaph for Du Fu

Han Qin (秦汉) · @hqinjarsy · Great Lives