In the last several years of his life, Johann Sebastian Bach, my musical hero, prepared several packages of music for publication, though he did not expect them to be actually published. They were intended to serve as a sort of summary of his art, a testament to his compositional skill.
The Matthäuspassion, in English: the St. Matthew Passion. This is a brilliant Oratorio, depicting the last days of Jesus, from the scene in the Garden of Gethsemane, to his interment in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea.
The Mass in B Minor. This version of the Catholic communion service is set to some of the most glorious music by Bach. Some of the numbers are modifications of existing arias and choruses by Bach himself. The work also features amazing writing for Baroque brass instruments.
The Musical Offering (Musicalische Opfer), a set of contrapuntal compositions called canons, of very high ingenuity.
The Goldberg Variations, a set of variations on a single theme, given by a German aristocrat.
The Brandenburg Concertos, a collection of 6 concerti grossi, an old musical form for groups of diverse instruments
The Well-Tempered Klavier, a set of 48 preludes and fugue in every key, major and minor, to celebrate a way of tuning a keyboard to make it possible to play in any key
The Art of Fugue, a set of 14 fugues, all based on the same subject. ('Subject' can be interpreted as 'theme'; a fugue uses a subject over and over, the subject not undergoing modification, as it would in a Beethoven symphony, however.)
The Art of Fugue is considered to be incomplete, because the last fugue (a fugue on four subjects—the common subject of the entire set, and three more subjects) is incomplete. That's not surprising, because writing a fugue on four subjects is not at all easy. To make it harder, the fourth subject he intended to use was his name: B A C H. In Germany, the letter B stood for B Flat; the letter H stood for B Natural! Using this as a subject for a fugue is not impossible, but Bach must have wanted to write a really good one.
Anyway.
After Bach had died, the music of the several fugues of The Art of Fugue were discovered among his belongings, together with the Unfinished fugue. And, on that last page, there was a chorale: 'Vor deinen Thrön hiermit' ("Here before Thy throne I stand"). Though it is called a chorale, that's the German word for chorale-prelude, that is, a composition based on a hymn- tune, where one of the voices is (possibly an elaborate version of) the hymn.
The hymn, based on an hymn tune composed by Frenchman Louis Bourgeois in the 1400s, was held in such high regard that it was printed in many hymn books for many years, until its popularity has faded in recent years.
When I was younger, I heard it sung in a favorite hymn, by an English choir: "The day thou gavest, Lord, is Ended." Obviously an evening hymn, the words are poetic, and the tune does suit the words well. Today, though, other tunes are used for this hymn.
As I wrote in an earlier post, evening hymns are occasionally used as funeral hymns (e.g. "Abide with me, fast falls the eventide.") So this tune, associated with two funeral hymns, could have been taken to mean that Bach felt his end was near, and so placed this chorale at the end of his Unfinished fugue. There is some reason to believe, however, that it wasn't placed by Bach at all, but by one of his assistants, or a son. (On the other hand, Bach is known to have died from complications arising from an eye operation, so if not completely blind, he was really in no state to write new music at the time of his death.)
There is also a lot of evidence (which I have not examined personally) to show that Bach was working on the Art of Fugue for at least 15 years; also, this Chorale had been written earlier.
Even without the drama, actual or invented, of the last minutes of Bach's life, The Art of Fugue is a fascinating collection of pieces. In particular, the very first fugue in the collection—titled Contrapunctus 1—is probably one of the best introductions to what a fugue is.
Arch
[Added later:]
Here is the Wikipedia-supplied link to an entry in an article for BWV 668:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Eighteen_Chorale_Preludes#BWV_668?wprov=sfla1
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