The Art of Fugue (BWV 1080): Final (unfinished) fugue
The Requiem by Mozart, Schubert's unfinished symphony, the incomplete Beach Boys album Smile... ever since the biblical story of the Tower of Babel we humans have been fascinated by the idea of an unfinished work of art. The reconstruction by Netherlands Bach Society of the ending of Bach's Art of Fugue gets us very close to what the master himself might have done, had his pen not stopped on the page. Perhaps the idea of incompleteness itself is a comforting thought -- even Bach, who left us so much high-quality art, never completed this culminating masterwork... is anyone's life's work every truly complete? Certainly Bach's legacy lives on despite this omission. Even so, we can't help but wonder what his ending to this piece would have sounded like. Netherlands Bach Society: The Art of Fugue (final movement; reconstruction of the ending by Kees van Houten and Leo van Doeselaar)