Letter
Bach’s Uncles
19 July 2001
Edward Said claims that illness prevented J.S. Bach from concluding the last piece in The Art of Fugue (LRB, 19 July). Said should know that you can’t compose a quadruple fugue without writing the ending first, and that the ‘missing’ final page of Bach’s final work, a self-inscribed musical epitaph Busoni re-created in his Fantasia Contrappuntistica, must have been misplaced – probably by...
