“When thinking about Bach’s Art of Fugue, two things stand out: on the one hand, it is one of the hardest pieces of Classical music; on the other, it is the source of more myths than almost any other piece in that repertory. Our film addresses both these points. It implies that the piece is so hard that Bach’s own son, the distinguished composer Carl Philip Emanuel, couldn’t figure out what was going on and wasn’t able to come up with a suitable ending for the 14th fugue. And it also reveals that many of the stories surrounding the score stem from what C. P. E. Bach said or didn’t say.

Since we are big fans of dark humor—Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove is an all-time favorite—this film is conceived as an allegory about how myths are made and disseminated. Given that we live in the Information Age and are constantly bombarded with both real and fake news, the issue of distinguishing fact from fiction is especially timely. We had great fun juxtaposing real things, such as the beautiful facsimile of Bach’s manuscripts and the image of Chevalier John Taylor, Bach’s eye doctor, with fake things, such as the costumes and sets, and with juxtaposing accurate descriptions of historical materials with deliberate anachronisms drawn from modern popular culture.

As regards, the myths themselves, no one knows for sure why C. P. E. Bach’s first edition of Art of Fugue is so muddled. We do know that Bach senior had started to prepare the score for print and that he died before it reached the press. We also know from C. P. E. Bach’s own autography that Bach senior was his son’s only music teacher. But the autobiography says little else about C. P. E. Bach’s relationship with his father. This lack of information makes us wonder whether he found it hard to follow in the footsteps of history’s most remarkable composers. Certainly, he was not the first son to have a tension with his fathers: just think of young Telemachus trying but failing to string the bow of his father Odysseus. ”