Had Bach lived, Miss Boron maintains, he intended to have 14 fugues each preceded by a canon "in the manner of meditations or commentary on each Station"--with canon 1 at the unison, canon 2 at the second, etc. (a scheme Bach did in fact employ in the Goldberg Variations). But of the four canons Bach did write (omitted in this performance), one is by augmentation in contrary motion, which already upsets her numerical scheme.

Nor does the character of the fugues gibe with the analogous Stations of the Cross. For instance, we have the Daughters of Jerusalem Weeping over Jesus in a piece with a cackling, repeated-note theme ('ha-ha-ha-and-ho-ho-ho'). The same theme turns up when Jesus is Nailed to the Cross (or is it now the 'rat-tat-tat-and-tap-tap-tap' of the hammer?).

When Bach worked a theme on the letters of his name into the unfinished Piece 19 (alias Jesus Laid in the Sepulcher), I half expected Miss Boron to claim that the interruption was Bach's way of paraphrasing Shakespeare's Antony, "My heart is in the coffin there with Jesus, and I must pause till it come back to me."

To compensate for the lack of an ending, an extraneous chorale-prelude, "Vor deinen Thron," was appended when The Art of Fugue was published after Bach's death. But Miss Boron states that it is "a significantly integral part of The Art of Fugue," although the chorale is in the key of G and all the other pieces are in D.

Bach specified no medium for the work, and I shall not go into the question of whether it ought to be played on the organ. Miss Boron had obviously practiced hard for many months on her own edition for organ; but in the end it was clear that the work was far beyond her technique, and should not have been attempted in public.

Miss Boron bore on doggedly through the final chorale, but she stumbled frequently over many notes and missed others completely. Her articulation was hap-hazard, and she often changed registration in the middle of phrases against all musical sense. Her rhythm was shaky, and in some fugues wilfully distorted to the point where all meter had wholly vanished.

The entire enterprise is, I fear, as ill-fated as that of the other American lady, Delia Bacon, who "proved" a century ago that Shakespeare's plays were really written by Francis Bacon. Bacon has now simply become Bachon.

POETRY CONTEST: will the entrant to the Poetry Competition whose pen name is "John Swiitz" please come to Matthews 4.