Wolfgang von Karajan & Wolfgang Graeser & The Art of The Fugue: Two Lives’ Synchronicity

This book is about three personalities – Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Graeser and Wolfgang von Karajan - and a great and mysterious work, Johann Sebastian Bach’s Art of the Fugue; a work which was ‘lost, hidden and found’. The Art of the Fugue was left unfinished - and in manuscriptal disorder at his death. Wolfgang Graeser finalized the comprehensible order to the work in 1926. This caused a global sensation in the musical world. He created a ‘performance version’ which has been said to reflect the musicological tastes of the time – ‘for large orchestra and organ': – but there appears to be no recording of his version – and without hearing an actual performance we shall never know. (This version is discussed and detailed in this book). Although Wolfgang Graeser’s performance version was then given all over the world, it seems that no-one found a convincing way of performing this extraordinary work - despite many versions being constructed for various instruments and combinations of instruments. In the early 1960’s, Wolfgang von Karajan, using Wolfgang Graeser’s order of the work, rationalized its performability with the use of 3 portable organs. It is reasonable to consider that this ‘performance-organisation ’ of the work is the most convincing of the so many now available to us. As the ‘Ensemble Wolfgang von Karajan ’, its trio of players performed the work innumerable times in public. They also recorded the work for posterity. This recording was issued, in mono only, on 2 vinyl discs – it would appear that a compact disc version was also later issued of it. The vinyl discs were made available in Germany, France and the United Kingdom. In France, the image given to their presentation was ‘religious’ - although Bach gave it no such indication; and although the commentary with the discs refers to the work as ‘absolute music’. Bach was deeply religious, and was also even esoteric, and Graeser involved himself – (misguidedly for one so young) - in types of ‘white’ occultism. This book touches on these aspects but, more particularly, on other aspects of the expansiveness of the human mind and how that is expressed – and, austerely, how that expression appears in the context of human existence and its consciousness’s knowledge of its corporeal ending in death. This book also touches on the question of ‘Absolute Music’ – what it is considered to be and whether, and if so how, it may be instrumentalized and played. This book also touches on ‘the times’ of the somewhat catastrophic 20th Century - with its two World Wars and the moral aberrations and miscalculations resulting therefrom in personal and professional lives – how some were able to ‘escape’ dark entanglements and how others seemed unable to avoid its seductive and compulsive malignities. In an attempt to show some disparate manifestations of these contexts this book also includes reference to other musicomanes - and also some pictorialism from the visual arts. Wolfgang von Karajan and Wolfgang Graeser were born and lived their youthful lives contemporaneously - although Graeser, a Swiss German, and von Karajan, a Salzburger, were never to meet. That lives’ contemporaneity ended when Graeser, tragically without any obvious explanation, committed suicide, on June 13th, 1928, in Berlin. Their being named ‘Wolfgang’ must, one asserts, be in homage to the supremely great Mozart. This book relates some of the ‘story’ surrounding these personalities and their ‘obsessive’ devotion to Bach’s Art of the Fugue. Due to their selfless devotion to it, this hugely great work began authentically ‘to sound’ in the modern era. So it is that these two Wolfgangs, and their work, should not be allowed to fall into oblivion.