In the early 1990s, I listened to a programme on Radio Belgrade 2 in which The Art of Fugue was connected with the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. At the time, I could not have imagined that more than three decades later I would return to the same myth through quantum mechanics, the event horizon, and the problem of measurement. Today, it seems to me that this connection is not entirely accidental.
I have already written about Bach within the Dirac Sea series, trying to view his music at the intersection of mathematics, physics, and metaphysics. The Art of Fugue, however, demands a somewhat different approach. This is not merely the work of a great composer demonstrating his mastery of counterpoint, but a work that, over almost three centuries, has become at once a musical construction, an intellectual testament, and a place where historical fact almost imperceptibly intertwines with myth.
Perhaps that is precisely why this work is ideal for a story about Bach.
Bach Was Not Merely a Church Musician
The simplified image of Johann Sebastian Bach as a genius, but primarily a practical church musician, does not quite fit his intellectual biography. His formal education ended before university, but it was rooted in the humanistic tradition of the Europe of his time. Latin and Greek, theology, rhetoric, history, arithmetic, and poetry were not peripheral subjects, but an integral part of education.
He studied music practically throughout his entire life. He learned from members of his family, studied and copied the works of other composers, absorbed German, Italian, and French traditions, and became one of the most highly regarded experts on organs of his age. His engagement with temperament, instrument construction, and the assessment of organs required a very concrete understanding of proportion, intervals, and the acoustic properties of sound.
For that reason, it is much more convincing to see him as an educated musician belonging to a world in which music, mathematics, theology, rhetoric, and philosophy had not yet become strictly separated disciplines.
Mizler’s Society and Music as Science
A particularly interesting path leads through Lorenz Christoph Mizler and his Society of Musical Sciences, which Bach joined in 1747. This was not a secret society in the modern popular sense, but an intellectual circle in which music, mathematics, philosophy, and the natural sciences were treated as interconnected fields.
Svetlana Stojanović Kutlača’s study “The Symbolism of Bach’s Work The Art of Fugue” places particular emphasis on precisely this connection. She situates Mizler’s society within an intellectual context shaped by interest in Pythagorean philosophy, mathematical relationships, theories of temperament, and the broader idea of unity between music and the natural order.
This does not mean that Bach was some hidden Hermetic thinker who turned his scores into coded philosophical treatises. But it does mean that he worked in an intellectual climate in which number and proportion were not merely technical tools of the musician, but part of a much broader picture of the world.
One Theme from Which an Entire World Emerges
The basic idea of The Art of Fugue is almost astonishingly simple: one theme becomes the starting point for an entire cycle of fourteen fugues and four canons. Its basic contour passes through inversion, augmentation, diminution, mirror treatment, combination with other themes, and increasingly complex contrapuntal relationships. And yet, despite all these transformations, the identity of the original idea never disappears completely.
This is precisely why the work becomes interesting beyond pure musicology. A single idea changes shape, enters new relationships, turns toward its own opposite, expands, contracts, appears in reflection, and still remains recognisable.
How much can something change and still remain what it is?
That is already a question of identity through transformation, not merely a question of contrapuntal technique.
Mathematics That Is Not Cold
The Art of Fugue has often been regarded as an almost abstract work, as “music for the eyes,” something to be followed in the score rather than simply heard. Yet such an interpretation easily overlooks what is actually audible. Chromaticism, dissonance, rhetorical pauses, dance rhythms, and the distinct characters of individual Contrapuncti give the work far more expressive power than one would expect from a mere contrapuntal treatise. It is precisely this tension between construction and expression that Svetlana Stojanović Kutlača also emphasises in her study.
In Bach, mathematical precision is not the opposite of emotion. It is its carrier.
A listener does not need to know what augmentation or inversion are in order to feel the tension in the development of a theme. Just as one does not need to understand structural engineering to be overwhelmed by a great cathedral, one does not need to follow every contrapuntal relationship in order to feel the monumentality of Bach’s sonic architecture.
But once we understand the construction, the experience becomes even deeper.
Number Between Mathematics and Symbolism
Numbers are certainly important in Bach, but this is also where caution becomes necessary. B-A-C-H, in the traditional numerical alphabet, adds up to 14, and in the unfinished Contrapunctus XIV the famous musical figure B-A-C-H appears. It is a highly seductive connection.
The study The Symbolism of Bach’s Work The Art of Fugue also refers to attempts to identify Fibonacci proportions and other numerical patterns in the large-scale structure of the work.
But there is a thin line between symbolism and numerology. The fact that we can discover a pattern does not automatically mean that the composer deliberately placed it there. The longer we search for numbers in a sufficiently large structure, the greater the probability that we will eventually find some interesting relationship.
The B-A-C-H motif is real musical material. Whether every appearance of the number 14 is a conscious signature by Bach is a far more open question.
That is where interpretation begins.
The Hermetic Hypothesis
Svetlana Stojanović Kutlača goes a step further and attempts to establish a parallel between the development of The Art of Fugue and ideas associated with the Emerald Tablet and the Hermetic tradition. At the centre of her interpretation are transformation, the relationship between the upper and lower worlds, the emergence of multiplicity from a single principle, and the idea of a “secret of creativity.”
Such a reading is fascinating, but it is not proof that Bach deliberately composed a musical commentary on a Hermetic text.
We can argue quite convincingly that Pythagorean, Neoplatonic, and Hermetic ideas belonged to an intellectual tradition that preceded Bach and was still present in his time. We can also show that Bach was close to people who thought about music through number, proportion, and universal order.
But we cannot therefore turn every thematic transformation into a coded philosophical statement.
Perhaps we do not even need such proof.
Because the most important transformation is already present in the music itself.
Everything emerges from one thing, one becomes many, and the many never forget their origin.
Orpheus Descends into the Underworld Again
This brings me back to that radio programme from the early 1990s. I can no longer reconstruct the author’s entire argument with confidence, but the basic idea has remained with me: a parallel between The Art of Fugue and the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.
The Orphic world, in fact, was never entirely foreign to me. As a high-school student I loved the poetry of Branko Miljković, especially his Triptych for Eurydice. His poetry went strangely well with Bach’s music for me. Only much later did I realise how often the same image — crossing a boundary, loss, return, and the impossibility of complete return — would reappear in my interests, from music and poetry to quantum mechanics and black holes.
Orpheus represents one of the oldest European images of the power of music. Through music he achieves what neither strength nor reason can accomplish. He crosses the boundary between the living and the dead, and for a moment his art changes even the rules of the underworld.
But only for a moment.
The boundary remains.
Eurydice is lost precisely when Orpheus turns around to verify what he was supposed to trust.
Decades later I returned to the same myth in the Dirac Sea, writing about quantum mechanics, black holes, Alice and Bob, and the event horizon. Once again, the same structure appeared: two worlds, a boundary between them, information we try to transfer across that boundary, and the question of whether the very act of verification changes what we are trying to discover.
Of course, I am not claiming that there is some hidden physical connection between Bach’s fugue and quantum theory.
But there are images deep enough to carry different meanings across different eras.
Orpheus is one of them.
Contrapunctus XIV — When Bach Enters His Own Music
The final fugue opens an entirely new dimension.
In its third section, a theme appears:
B-A-C-H.
Through his own name, Bach enters his own contrapuntal world.
And then the music breaks off.
This is where the legend begins.
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach left a note stating that his father died while working on this very fugue. Later editions further strengthened the idea that death interrupted the great final contrapuntal undertaking. Manuscript analysis, however, complicates this romantic image. The study we have discussed also notes that the final page was written earlier and that some modern researchers reject the simple picture of death literally stopping the pen in the middle of the last bar.
Was the ending lost?
Was Bach no longer able to complete it?
Did he simply abandon the work?
Or did he perhaps deliberately leave it open?
We do not know.
But it was almost inevitable that such a gap would give birth to myth.
When a Family Story Becomes a Cultural Myth
After his death, the family had to publish the work. Alongside The Art of Fugue appeared the chorale Vor deinen Thron tret ich hiermit — “Before Your Throne I Now Appear.”
And once again, a story was born.
According to later tradition, the blind Bach dictated this chorale to his son-in-law shortly before his death. Even when historical analysis makes that image much less certain, its symbolic power remains almost untouched.
For it is difficult to imagine a more fitting final title for the life of a man who dedicated so much of his creative work to God.
“Before Your Throne I Now Appear.”
Family myths arise within a small circle of people. But when the family is the Bach family, such a myth can become part of the world’s cultural heritage.
At this point Jung may become more interesting to us than the chronicler.
A myth does not necessarily survive because it is historically flawless. It survives because it answers a deeper need for a life to acquire shape, meaning, and a final dramatic accent.
According to the myth, even on his deathbed Bach does not cease to be Bach.
He is blind, but he composes.
Before him there is no longer a church council, a prince, or an audience.
In the end there is only music.
And the One for whom it was intended.
The Final Glimpse
There is one more family story.
According to it, Bach briefly regained his sight near the end of his life. Long enough to see the members of his family once again. His condition then worsened, and he died soon afterwards.
Here too, we have no medical documentation that would allow us to reconstruct the event reliably.
We can attempt to offer a physiological explanation.
Someone else will see in it the grace of God toward a man who dedicated the greater part of his creative life to Him.
We might even, using the contemporary language with which we describe NDE or ESP experiences, construct another explanation.
But all of these would be interpretations.
History leaves a gap here.
And the human need for meaning almost never leaves gaps unfilled.
Between History and Myth
We do not know with certainty what Bach’s final hours looked like. We have no medical report that would allow us to separate fact from family memory. And so the gaps were filled by stories. One of them says that shortly before his death his sight briefly returned, long enough for him to see the members of his family one last time. Was this a temporary physiological phenomenon, a near-death experience, a religious sign, or simply a family legend shaped later? We cannot know. But such stories endure precisely because they give form to what history has left unfinished.
We do not have reliable facts about how Bach died; myth tells us how we wanted such a life to end.
Perhaps that is precisely why the story of the unfinished Contrapunctus XIV became so powerful.
Not because we know that Bach wanted exactly this ending.
But because for more than two and a half centuries we have listened to it as an ending.
In Bach’s great fugues, we are accustomed to the moment when accumulated contrapuntal energy finally gathers itself. Voices that have chased, intertwined, and collided find a common point. The tension resolves. The structure receives its final vault.
Here, there is no such moment.
B-A-C-H appears within his own music.
The counterpoint continues.
And then it stops.
There is no final chord to tell us that everything is complete.
There is no final full stop.
Only silence.
We can attempt to reconstruct what is missing. Many composers, performers, and musicologists have already done so. We can demonstrate how the themes might be combined and how the great quadruple fugue toward which this course may have been leading could perhaps have looked.
In doing so, we would gain an ending.
But perhaps we would lose something else.
Contrapunctus XIV does not end with a great chord that resolves the tension. It ends with an interruption that, with time, begins to resemble something more dignified than a final cadence — a passage into silence. Perhaps that is precisely why its incompleteness no longer feels like an absence, but like the final form of meaning
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