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That time spent getting the headboard, for example, was frankly spent in a sort of grim fugue state, wordlessly drifting from place to place in exhausted resignation.

More than 100 renderings by artists as grand as David Hockney delivered fugue variants in form and material.

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.”