The Hungarian early music group Affetti Musicali, founded by the Hungarian musicologist János Malina in 1984, specialises in the historic performance of 17th- and 18th-century (and, in a few cases, later) vocal chamber music, both sacred and secular. Cantatas, duets, solo motets etc. alternate in their programs with contemporary sonatas and trio sonatas. The repertoire of the ensemble is extremely rich and exciting: they often unearth and perform virtually unknown masterpieces of great composers from Carissimi to Hasse. Their creed is that the music of past centuries, once revived and given proper performance, will become organic part of our modern culture. Affetti Musicali propagates this belief, live and through their records, across Europe.

János Malina: The Ultimate Fugue

Johann Sebastian Bach: Contrapunctus 14 für Orgel aus der
Kunst der Fuge. Arranged by Zoltán Göncz.
Stuttgart, Carus-Verlag, 2006, 20 pp.

Last year, Carus-Verlag, a Stuttgart publisher specialising in early vocal church music, issued a slender volume containing Zoltán Göncz's reconstruction of the last movement of Bach's The Art of Fugue, a late work considered to be one of his crowning achievements. The 19th movement, Contrapunctus 14, is arguably the most famous unfinished composition next to Mozart's Requiem and Schubert's "Unfinished" Symphony.

Göncz's reconstruction is based on his research in print both in Hungary and abroad as early as the 1990s. It was a decade and a half before the final result was published.

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