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Description: |
Three preludes and fugues (BWV 854,849,860) from Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I” are represented in this triptych painted by Christopher Hogue. Between silvery recitals by Charlotte Nedinger on harpsichord, we listen to Karen Woolridge speak with warmth and clarity the words of Anne Michaels’ poem “Repairing the Octave”. Her theme is healing through conflict.
In her mind are two couples, three hundred years apart: Bach, blind, tended by his wife Anna Magdalena, while they listen to the playing of some of their 20 children; and the poet herself, Anne Michaels remembering, by the bedside of her father abstracted now by Alzheimer’s, how one long-gone winter’s day they shared hearing “the clear precision of the fugue/on the car radio.” She recalls her father’s dedication to Bach’s music, him learning to sing the notes, then to play them on the piano: “…how the voices of the fugue /entered each other like needle and thread/through cloth.” Kinship in music heals all separation: “The two men sit in the dark. / What is 300 years /between one voice/ and another?” |
