Johann Sebastian Bach — B A C H (The Final Fugue, 1748–49) — Notebook

The final fugue of The Art of Fugue, in Bach's hand, as far as he wrote it. Then pages of your own.

The document

The final fugue of Johann Sebastian Bach's The Art of Fugue stops in the middle of a bar. Beside it, a later hand noted that the author died while at work on it: ist der Verfaßer gestorben. The note is usually attributed to his son Carl Philipp Emanuel. The leaves themselves date from 1748–49; Bach died in July 1750. No one knows for certain why the music stops. The five leaves are kept at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, and this notebook reproduces them complete.

Inside the notebook

First, a short guide: where it breaks off; the note beside it, and what it says; the dates, and the two operations on his eyes in the spring of 1750; what The Art of Fugue is, and the name B-A-C-H written in notes; the two papers of the manuscript; and why it stops, a question on which the scholars who have studied it disagree.

Then the manuscript: its five pages of music, every leaf at the same scale, 78% of its size.

On the last of them the music stops, and the page facing it is the first of yours: 102 pages of staff paper, ruled like Bach's, two staves to a system and five systems to a page.

A4, spiral-bound, it lies flat. The leaves are oblong, and so is the notebook: it opens the way they do.

Johann Sebastian Bach · The Art of Fugue, the final fugue, BWV 1080/19 · autograph · 1748–49 · Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Musikabteilung, Mus.ms. Bach P 200/1

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