Bwv 562

This is the Fantasia and Fugue in C minor by Johann Sebastian Bach, and you will have heard the Fantasia part if you were watching the funeral services of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II earlier this week.  It was the organ piece played at the end of the service, at both Westminster Abbey and St George ' s Chapel Windsor.The Fantasia is followed in the manuscripts and some recordings by a Fugue, but the fugue is incomplete and stops abruptly.There are several recordings on YouTube,some to show playing technique by Willem Tanke (scroll down in this playlist), andone reconstructing the fugue, by Gilberto Scordari (talk in Italian with English subtitles).  This was presented at the Mareterra Festival in 2021, and is hosted on YouTube by the Societa Bachiana Italiana.Scordari finds one of the musical themes also used in a Bach cantata (BWV 6).  The cantata uses words from the account in Luke ' s gospel of two disciples meeting Jesus as they walk, post resurrection, to Emmaus.  Scordari does some textual analysis of Luke and finds a " chiasm " structure, of four episodes, then parallels to those four, only in reverse, a sort of ABCDDCBA pattern.  He finds parallels to that in the musical structure of the Fantasia and what there is of the Fugue, and extrapolates it to reconstruct the rest of the fugue.  A bit of musicology and structural criticism of the Bible, in one.Another reconstruction of the fugue is by Andreas Fischer, th...
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