17 OLIVIER LATRY For Notre-Dame, you’ve said that you chose pieces that are less polyphonic than some of the others . . . I made a selection of pieces on a massive scale, which doesn’t mean that some of them are any less polyphonic – just look at, say, the Ricercare a 6 from The Musical Offering BWV 1079. There one needs to preserve a high degree of clarity in the polyphony by isolating, for instance, one or more voices on different manuals. The same is true of the Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor BWV 582, one of Bach’s most inspired works. The Passacaglia, a type of movement that originated as a dance, consists of twenty variations or, more precisely, successive metamorphoses derived from the initial theme. Musicological analysis of the work reveals the complexity of its number symbolism, so essential a feature of Bach. Marie-Claire Alain found relationships between chorales from the Orgelbüchlein – a collection of forty-five organ chorales, the composer’s ‘Bible’, so to speak – and the structure of this passacaglia. For here Bach depicts the life of Christ in music, borrowing, in this piece, from various chorales. This composition is a genuine jeu d’esprit, presenting a universe all its own that is born, lives, dies, is reborn in a recurring cycle, just like later works such as the Goldberg Variations.
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