Gustav Leonhardt's 1953 harpsichord recording of
Bach's The Art of Fugue had a second life as a staple of the old Musical Heritage Society catalog in the 1970s, and it's now embarking on a third in this digitally remastered reissue. The work, written in open score with no indication of instrumentation, has been played on the piano and by various instrumental ensembles. They can be played in any order; the simpler fugues presumably come first (and CD programming has made the ordering less of an issue than it used to be).
Leonhardt made persuasive arguments that it was intended for harpsichord, but there are still just a few major harpsichord recordings. This one stands comparison with any of the more recent ones, which isn't bad for a 1953 recording, especially in the fast-changing world of Baroque performance.
The Art of Fugue consists of an enormous (and just barely incomplete) set of fugues
Bach wrote at the end of his life as a sort of summation of his contrapuntal art. A fairly ordinary theme is subjected to every conceivable type of contrapuntal manipulation in a tour de force of musical abstraction. Get too deeply involved in it, and you may never come out again. The arguments for playing it on the harpsichord are partly historical (there was a tradition of writing keyboard works in open score) but also interpretive -- the harpsichord, with its invariable attacks, seems suited to the abstract nature of the work. Performing it with a string ensemble or a diverse group of instruments introduces an extraneous element that might not detract from other
Bach works, but it detracts from this one.
The key to the durability of the
Leonhardt recording is that he extends the work's severe, abstract quality as far as he can. His interpretations are stately, hard, and just about as slow as they can be without having the momentum crash and burn. For the listener who is pursuing the complexities-within-complexities of this work, it is
Leonhardt who exposes them most clearly. He was 25 when he made these records, and they have something of the extremity of youth that one prizes when it hits the mark.
There are a few negatives. The booklet simply reproduces the text of the original 1953 album cover -- interesting, but a few words of perspective would have been in order. The recording was made before harpsichord reconstructors had shown what could be done with instruments of the eighteenth century as models (the modern German instrument
Leonhardt used is not bad, just not beautiful), and the somewhat dull 1953 sound hasn't been improved much by digital remastering. Nevertheless, this is a classic recording that hasn't gone out of style in the least.
Leonhardt recorded the work once again, in 1970; that performance, reissued once, is generally unavailable.