Since its first publication in 1751 (a year after Bach’s death), the work was often treated as Augenmusik. It was re-published, studied and analysed during the nineteenth-century, but did not receive a complete public performance until 1927, under the direction of then-Thomaskantor Karl Straube. Straube used Wolfgang Graeser’s colourful orchestration, which employed a variety of instrumental combinations – from solo harpsichord and organ, through solo strings, to a full orchestra of strings, brass, woodwinds and organ. Such orchestrations helped The Art of Fugue to finally reach the concert halls. However, they also strengthened the notion that the work was not bound to any particular instrumentation – thus bolstering, even in listeners’ ears, the Augenmusik myth.

The work’s compositional history

Recent research into The Art of Fugue’s chronology (especially by Yoshikate Kobayashi and Christoph Wolff) has cast doubt on its “Last Will and Testament” status. Bach probably began composing the work relatively early – between 1738 and 1742. By 1746, he completed the work’s first version, consisting of 12 fugues and 2 canons. Between 1746 and 1749 he began preparing it for publication. For this version he added two fugues and two canons, revised several of the older movements, and placed all the movements in a new sequence.

When Bach died in 1750, the engraving was only partly finished; the printing work was completed in 1751, under Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s supervision. The edition, as published, did not entirely reflect J. S. Bach’s own wishes: the inclusion of two versions of Contrapunctus 10 is certainly an error, and the publishers included Bach’s so-called “Deathbed chorale” (Vor deinen Thron tret ich hiermit, BWV 668 – Bach’s 1750 revision of his own Wenn wir in höchsten Nöthen from the Weimar Orgel-Büchlein), which has no musical link with The Art of Fugue. Some also argue that the last, incomplete fugue does not belong to The Art of Fugue, and the title’s authenticity has also been questioned.

The Augenmusik myth has not fared well in recent scholarship, either – though it does have some basis in fact. The work’s aim was, at least in part, pedagogical: students and teachers of composition and performance could use it to understand, and grapple with, the intricacies of counterpoint and its realisation in performance. To be practical, such a work would have to be playable by the student alone, or at least by student and teacher together. The Art of Fugue fulfils this condition: most of it is playable on a single keyboard.

Thus, the work was intended more for active performers than for passive listeners. As Charles Rosen puts it, “it is, above all, a work for oneself to play, to feel under one’s fingers as well as to hear”. The music was printed in an open score, with each voice printed on a separate stave – not an uncommon format for keyboard music in the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries. Players could thus easily observe the autonomous character of individual voices, and the way they interact with each other, even when their fingers cannot do full justice to these features.