Bach’s open score notwithstanding, most scholars now believe that The Art of Fugue is keyboard music. Davitt Moroney is quite unfazed by the layout because ‘such notation was normal for intricate contrapuntal keyboard music from the late 16th century onwards (as the works of Frescobaldi and Froberger, among others, clearly show)’; he even goes further and favours the harpsichord. Tuma prefers the organ because the music ‘comes across in all its monumental splendour, both in terms of sheer vastness of sound and in its intimate subtleties of tempo, articulation and expressive means’. But when monumentality conflicts with intimacy, clarity suffers and an essential ingredient of fugal texture is sacrificed. Take Contrapunctus 6, which Bach directs to be played in the French style. Tuma opts for ‘monumental splendour’ which might have worked had he not miscalculated in two areas. He ignores the need for double dotting that deprives the piece of a snappy rhythm; and his choice of stops for a big sound is such that the strands are unevenly weighted. In some other pieces the top line dominates, ludicrously so in the Canon alla ottava where the imitating voice sounds like an echo rather than an equal component of the music.
Tuma argues convincingly in the booklet for his choice of organ, and in this discreetly balanced recording it emerges as a most attractive instrument. Some of its stops have a silvery timbre that is used to advantage in the Contrapuncti 8 and 9. In cases like these, form and content come together so much better because the lines are more clearly defined. Tuma’s choice of tempos cannot be faulted in any of the works in this set (his registrations for the fill-ups are successful too), which also offers without comment an extra item called Contrapunctus 14. It appears to be an early composition (BWV1080a/6) that wasn’t included in the final edition. The real Contrapunctus 14 is the unfinished fugue. But Tuma’s interpretation skilfully suggests an air of finality, thus lending weight to Christoph Wolff’s recent theory that the piece isn’t incomplete. Bach had stopped as planned.
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