Revolutionary new Bach-edition released by Hungarian professors

The new publication edited by violinist Márta Ábrahám and composer Barnabás Dukay is a real world premiere. The authors are professors of the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, Budapest, well-known for their Bach research. Their first book Excerpts from Eternity was published in 2017. The work is an analysis of the Chaconne, and it reveals a special hidden time-code, that has not been discovered for 300 years.

In 2021 they released a special sheet music series, which is now recognised globally as one-of-a-kind.

The festive publication of J. S. Bach’s Complete Special Edition of the three
Fugues for Solo Violin is curated by publisher BioBach-Music biobach.com. The work contains sheet music based on a thorough analysis in which „every note is accounted for”. The analysis is manifested in a special visual image: coloured notes and layered by voices. The sheet music is complemented by a list of themes, illustrations and explanations. The music graphic was created by Eveline Meier, a Swiss violinist living in Budapest, who graduated with a degree “Summa Cum Laude” at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music as a pupil of Márta Ábrahám in 2020.

The first volume of the Complete Special Edition is a sheet music and a poster of the Fugue in G minor “Christmas” (BWV 1001) with a supplement of the themes’s list. The second volume is the Fugue in A minor “Holy Week” (BWV 1003) and the third is the music of the Fugue in C major “Pentecost” (BWV1005).

Many are preoccupied with the question: what is the character of Bach’s extraordinary musical nature, the genius of his masterpieces?

Are these consciously constructed creative works, or a product of special, superhuman abilities activated by a divine spark – or a combination of the two?

If we want to get closer to Bach’s music, we need to understand the symbolic meaning and the original concept of his works. His fugues are very similar in length, scale, and proportion to the construction of large Gothic cathedrals. Their spirituality represents the hierarchy of the created world’s existing order, proclaiming the glory of God. In Bach’s hands, cosmic proportions are transformed into music at the highest artistic, intellectual and spiritual levels.

There is order in Bach’s music. However, organisation is not always visible, as it lies mostly below the surface. The precise arrangement of the musical materials is, in fact, the result of an architecture formed by contrapuntal methods from the different layers of the music’s colourful, polyphonic texture. Bach often hides, and in many cases combines musical contexts into coded symbol-systems. Notes are embedded in complex mathematical and combinatorial connections and intertwined systems like twisting vines. They form networks of context that carry transcendent and theological contents beyond music. So it is clear that the Master’s musical language is very complex. Zoltán Gárdonyi aptly summarises the extraordinary nature of Bach’s music, answering the questions asked earlier: