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They are just voices.
They are voices that intertwine. That chase each other. That fit together. That chain together. That melt away. They are voices, not instruments. They are voices that envelop you. This is no longer music, it's an absolute that climbs into counterpoints, that mingles within you.
They are just fugues.
Fugues not only musical. Escapes from oneself, from the world, from misery. This is "the terrible rowing towards God". It is the exposition of a simple and strong theme. A theme that holds like a keystone one of the greatest musical monuments of all time. A theme in D minor. Proposed, re-proposed, mirrored, straightened, trapped in a counterpoint, until breaking its rules in a silence of inconceivable proportions. The unfinished "Fuga a Tre Soggetti".
I listen to the "Art of the Fugue" and it seems I am waiting. Waiting for God.
"I live twice in daily appearances and in the true being of my deeper feelings. It seems that in order for me to live doubly, I almost feel obliged to die first."
So, I listen to the "Canon Alla Duodecima In Contrapuncto Alla Quinta". The violin and the cello that mirror each other, purring slyly like two old flirting cats.
I listen while floating in the notes. This edition of the "Art of the Fugue" by the Quartetto Bernini is beautiful. It is creamy, dense, sparkling at times. It happened to be in my hands by chance, passed on by a friend who had spotted on the cover the airy oriental charm of Yoko Ichihara, here a splendid second violin. "Because... well... the Art of the Fugue... but if there's also a bit of a chick..." And well, poetry above all.
"Love is ambitious, lack of love is content. Love is a struggle, it is life, and it always wants to act, never to stop, love is spring water, which no one can ever harness, not even the dams of those who do not want to hear, but then sadness overflows, thoughts whirl, and death like a whirlpool drags you to the bottom, among the coils"
Here it is, the splendid "Canon in Hypodiatesseron per augmentationem, perpetuus". It is the line of the violin that insinuates itself into the soul to swim against the current, to contain the escape of ideas, to bring order, music that rows towards God in a firm melancholy, always lucid and never subdued. Or the uncertainty on which the entire "Contrapunctus X, A 4, Alla Decima" rests, the only piece in the entire work that begins suspended on a C sharp that sinks like a foot into the quicksands of the heart.
"There are plays of shadow and color, of bluish waves and ever-white foam, on the dock. There is the wake, and the water closes over, onto memories. There is always her body here, and her light, like a flash in the sky, there is her gaze, her skin, present all around. There is only my shadow, noon is not enough not to feel it anymore"
There are the pointed notes that chase each other, that anxiously crave each other in the "Contrapunctus VI in Stylo Francese". They are in the mind. A counterpoint that when interrupted seems to close over you, in a sea of silence, to drag you inside it.
"Olvido" is a splendid Spanish word, which does not mean only "forgetfulness". There is a bitterness in this word, so much so it's almost an anagram of "livido" ("bruise"), a mental bruise, the unlove that forgets you.
This is what the "Art of the Fugue" is, it is a musical anagram. But it's the anagram of God in music, it's a shroud without a face or instruments, a linen without a body, a final fugue with three themes that interlock in the name BACH without finding a solution, because the solution is only God, and in front of Him there is only silence.
The "Art of the Fugue" remains unfinished. Like the life of man. And in the end, Bach appends a chorale, from long ago, "Vor deinen Thron trett ich hiemit" (Before your throne I now appear).
Because for Bach, "the truth" cannot be anagrammed - as is done now - into "relative".
[In this review, somewhat "mirror-like", are some of my "fugitive" thoughts from some years ago]
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