[coldcode]

Even more amazing is that Bach (and others as well) could build a fugue while improvising. It's like live coding multi threaded software. Even late in life Bach was given a challenge on the spot to build something from a given set of notes, and the Goldberg Variations are the result (he remembered what he did and wrote it out later). I still love listening to the last thing he ever worked on (a quadruple fugue in the Art Of Fugue) where he died essentially in the middle of writing the piece, the stopping of the music is so stark you feel the death.

[corey_moncure]

I think you might be referring to the Musical Offering. The Goldberg Variations were after the aria in Anna Magdalena's book.

Also, research suggests that the story of Bach dying before finishing the final fugue in Art of Fugue is inaccurate. An analysis of the paper in the extant manuscript, the tools used to draw the staff lines, and the simple realization that there is no way even Bach could have undertaken such a huge work without deriving the final combination of the fugal subjects before hand, all point to a completion in the year 1747 or 1748, but lost. The fragment that survives is likely to be a rough draft.

I wrote my senior paper in undergrad on this.

In fact the last work completed by the master is believed to be the "Et Incarnatus Est" in second (later) half of the B minor mass.