(Roughly) Daily

Using his “musical animation machine.” Stephen Malinowski illustrates the genius of Bach’s “Great” Fugue in G minor, BWV 542…

Q: What’s so “great” about this fugue?

A: It’s called “great” to distinguish it from the other fugue in G minor (BWV 578) which is called “little”; you can compare it here. The BWV 578 fugue is a stand-alone piece, but BWV 542 is a pair of pieces; its full title is “Fantasia and Fugue in G minor.”…

* James Hilton

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As we marvel, we might recall that it was on this date in 1762 that Christoph Willibald Gluck‘s glorious opera Orfeo ed Euridice premiered at the Burgtheater in Vienna, in the presence of Empress Maria Theresa. The first of Gluck’s “reform” operas (which brought “noble simplicity” to what had become abstruse opera seria), it was hugely influential on subsequent German operas. Variations on its plot—the underground rescue mission in which the hero must control, or conceal, his emotions—can be found in Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Beethoven’s Fidelio, and Wagner’s Das Rheingold.