fugue

He started playing piano at the age of two and, at just 17, gave a remarkable two-and-a-half-hour concert featuring the 24 preludes and fugues by composer Dmitri Shostakovich.

In uniform, Mr. Merkel started experiencing strange fugue states, where he would be awake but barely responsive and would retain little memory afterward of what had happened.

In 1966 he wrote of overcoming his dissatisfaction with two takes of a fugue from Book 1 of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, one take he considered “rather pompous” and the other overly jubilant — and both “monotonous.”

The first half of the Met Orchestra’s concert included a somewhat bumpy reading of a fugue from Bach’s “Musical Offering,” in an instrumentation by Anton Webern.

He made the claim again just the other day and his ecstatic followers practically went into a collective fugue state and began speaking in tongues they were so thrilled.