There are works that one doesn't so much listen to as enter into, and The Art of Fugue BWV 1080 is the ultimate example of that. It may well be Bach's most paradoxical creation: a monument of absolute musical mastery that simultaneously ends with a question mark, a work that seems organized down to the smallest detail yet deliberately remains unfinished. When Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) died in 1750, he left behind no instructions regarding instrumentation, sequence, or even whether the work was intended for performance or silent contemplation. Anyone venturing into this contrapuntal labyrinth must therefore be not only a musician but also something of an archaeologist. Michael Tsalka, with this new double CD on Da Vinci Classics, proves he is both.
Tsalka, affiliated with the School of Music at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a sought-after soloist on both the modern grand piano and historical keyboard instruments, chose the piano for this recording – a choice that may seem unremarkable at first glance, but proves precisely right upon closer listening. The piano offers here no Romantic magnification of Bach, no attempt to draw the music toward a later aesthetic, but rather a remarkable clarity: each voice receives its own color and breathing space without the work fragmenting into separate lines. Where some performances let the fourteen Counterpoints and four Canons sink into academic grayness, Tsalka consistently allows the dancing pulse to shine through that Bach, despite all his learning, never lost sight of. Musicologist Nicholas Smith rightly points out in the extensive liner notes that this work should not be understood as a dry didactic treatise, but as a celebration of life itself.
What is particularly striking is the ordering Tsalka employs: not the sequence of the posthumous first edition of 1751, but an arrangement following recent insights of scholars such as Reinhard Goebel, one that mirrors the structure of the Goldberg Variations – four groups of fugues of increasing complexity, each interrupted by a canon. It is a reading that is dramatically convincing: one no longer hears merely a series of contrapuntal experiments, but a journey in which Bach gradually leads the listener deeper into his musical universe. From clarity to intensification, from play to mystery, the tension grows step by step, until the unfinished Fugue with 3 Subjects.
In it Bach writes his own name in notes – B-A-C-H, with the German note names representing the pitches B-flat-A-C-B – just before illness and blindness prevented him from continuing the work. Later tradition made this moment the symbolic image of a composer inscribing his own name into music one last time, as if entrusting himself to eternity. Tsalka appropriately concludes with the organ chorale Before Thy Throne I Now Appear (BWV 668), thus letting the work end as Bach himself left it: not as a resolved final chord, but as a prayer.
What above all distinguishes this recording is that Tsalka does not pursue the illusion of a definitive interpretation. He himself recounts that he has studied this work for decades without ever fully "grasping" it – and it is precisely this humility that one hears in his playing. His piano sound is crystal clear and honest, never cold or merely analytical. The voices in the counterpoint are weighed with great care, while carefully considered tempi give the music a natural repose. Tsalka never rushes for effect; he allows the fugues to breathe and creates a performance that convinces not through monumentality but through concentration. An almost contemplative calm emerges, not because the music loses its complexity, but precisely because each line finds its place within the larger whole.
No bravura, no need to impress the listener, the outside world, or – as he himself puts it – posterity. Instead: attentive, almost prayerful listening to what the music itself asks. The dedication of this recording to the late Prof. Aminadav Dykman adds another layer of personal devotion, which manifests itself in the way each voice in the counterpoint receives breathing space without losing the architecture of the whole.
Is this a recommendation for those still getting to know Bach? Probably not – Tsalka himself would be the first to admit that The Art of Fugue is not an entry-level work. But for those who have wrestled with this piece for years, with this music that, no matter how often one returns to it, never quite lets itself be grasped, this double CD offers a guide that itself doesn't pretend to have the labyrinth's map complete. Perhaps the true completion of The Art of Fugue lies not in adding a missing measure or an invented ending, but in each new attempt to listen to what Bach has left us: not a closed monument, but a living question. And perhaps that, for a work its maker never got to finish, is the most honest form of tribute.
