If any work should deserve the title "The Art of Listening" then this is it.It stands today as one of the mysteries in music literature, one of his greatest achievements. It certainly is his most complex work, a musical journey with a beginning, middle and end. Although the themes are the basis of the work, they are not the carrier of the dramatic or intimate line of each fugue. It's what we hear around the themes that shows the character of each passage and its development.

Geoffrey Madge