The Art of Fugue. Bach Fugues for Keyboard, 1715 –1750. Chapter 13.

The Art of Fugue. Bach Fugues for Keyboard, 1715 –1750.

by Joseph Kerman

© 2005 by The Regents of the University of California, Open Access edition © 2015.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND license.

________________________________________

Chapter 13

Fugue in A-flat Major

The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1

This fugue, among the more concise pieces in The Well-Tempered Clavier, is much loved by players and admired in the literature, though what seem to be its special, perhaps unique, features have not been remarked on or discussed. One of these is the way the answer in this fugue tends to cleave to the subject. As the piece proceeds, one feels more and more that its basic material has to be the subject together with its answer, which may be called the “subject-pair”—the subject-pair, not the single subject. The linkage is a consequence of the “open” ending of the subject, on the fifth degree, E♭, rather than on the more stable and much more common third degree or tonic, and of its rhythmic profile: entirely even, up to the point where it is firmly end-stopped.

Bach is articulating an elemental, elementary rhythmic cliché:

Twinkle, twinkle, little star,

How I wonder what you are,

one and two and three and four—one and two and three and four. True, the melodic contour of the subject ensures that it doesn’t feel quite as jejune as that, only very simple. The won­der is how in so short a time so much eloquence can be made to emerge from such childlike beginnings. While the subject-pairs may be rudimentary and identical in rhythm, they are not iden­tical or altogether simple in pitch content. The pitch configura­tion is modified so as to register distress [bars 17–19] or convey different shades of quiet enthusiasm and release [23–25, 29–31] or touch on real sorrow [27–29].

Emotional range is another special feature of this short com­position, all the more remarkable because of the overall tone of restraint.

First Phase: Bars 1–23

The flowing sixteenth-note figures of this fugue, which con­trast with the more slowly flowing subject, are worth some close attention. They come in many slightly different patterns, cul­minating in the bass of the recurring episode first heard in bars 11–13. At their first appearance in bars 2–3 these figures do not shape themselves into a countersubject but propel the end of the answer into a slightly awkward sequence: E♭↗A♭ G E♭↗ C A♭ | B♭ ∫ E♭↗B♭ G E♭↗A♭ F | G. This is the one place in the fugue where the subject-pair does not end-stop.

One would never guess the role destined for the pattern of sixteenths below the third entry, in the bass [bars 5–6]—until Bach repeats it several more times in an episode, as though to establish its bona fides as a latter-day countersubject [7–9]. It will track the subject at bar 18 (in inversion) and then in bars 23, 24, and 29.

After this repetitive, almost ruminative episode come three parallel segments, each presenting a subject entry or subject-pair leading to a new recurring episode, a filled-out version of the sequence adumbrated in bar 3 [bars 10–13, 13–15, 17–20]. The awk­wardness has disappeared. The triple counterpoint appears each time in different contrapuntal inversions, and one could hardly find a better instance to illustrate the expressive power of this device. Hugo Riemann observed that these episodes do not feel like “independent, real ‘between’ members in the period struc­ture,” as is generally the case in fugues, but like essential com­pletions or fulfillments (Vollziehungen) of the entries themselves. Tovey went so far as to declare the episodes, not the subject entries, the most important events in this composition.

At least to some extent, these responses must be due to the episode’s intrinsic beauty. Although utterly simple in harmony—it moves around the circle of fifths with the usual standard suspensions—the detailing is exquisite: the flickers of dissonance caused by échappée notes such as the C at the end of bar 11, and the momentary lift caused by the pair of sixteenth notes in bar 20.

The entries that are “fulfilled” by this recurring episode come first on the tonic, then on the submediant (F minor), and then on the supertonic (B-flat minor, answered by another entry con­firming that key). This is the area in the fugue that modulates, then, introducing minor-mode sonorities made sumptuous by the four-part writing. A strong cadence in the dominant, E flat major, is guided in by the suggestion of another entry, in the alto, with a feint at stretto in the soprano [bars 21–23]. It is more than a suggestion; one can hear the whole subject, extended so as to reach a firm close, as though the notation were as shown in example 17. Compare bars 33–35; the Fugue in A-flat is actu­ally a camouflaged member of the family of fugal compositions evoking the binary structure of dance form. We have met or will meet several of these family members: the Fughetta in C, BWV 952, the G-Minor Gigue, and the Fugue in B-flat Major from book 2 of the WTC.

Second Phase: Bars 23–35

After this strong, form-defining cadence, the fugue opens up onto a serene, drawn-out plateau, a sort of diffused and moder­ated area of climax. Again, this is a feature that seems special to this composition.

The new subject-pairs flow into new episodes, just as brief as the previous recurring episode and just as articulate and inte­gral. In bars 23–25 the subject itself changes in two seemingly contradictory ways. Melodically it expands, as the interval of a sixth (the key interval that furnished the melody with its peak) stretches to a seventh, while harmonically it contracts, since the melodic change allows a single dominant-seventh chord to underpin every beat until the last. Contrapunctus 4 in The Art of Fugue includes a memorable similar case, though in that case the thematic expansion of a sixth to a seventh promotes a dramatic intensification of harmony. In the Fugue in A-flat the subject-pair does not register drama at this point but liberation, new lyricism, and grace. David Ledbetter calls the subject of this fugue “lovable”; it is never more lovable than here.

The next fulfilling episode resembles the previous ones in some ways, but unlike them, it cannot be imagined in contra­puntal inversion, with the original soprano line half-hidden away in the lower voices. This episode celebrates melody, esca­lating melody, almost “unending melody” in Wagner’s sense. It eases the melodic line downward from the expansive soprano entry in bar 24 with wonderfully mellow arabesques and then goes on to initiate another, second linear descent, over the next entries [bars 27–30].

The last two subject-pairs join to form a full, and therefore quietly climactic exposition of the fugue’s four voices. The steady pulsation works its way up ceremoniously and radiantly through the bass, tenor, alto, and soprano to join the overarching soprano melody. The soprano entry is the highest yet, and the arabesques, inverted, mount higher still, outdoing themselves in eloquence, then becoming a chain of descending thirds (A♭ F D♭ B♭ G): music for a benediction [bar 32]. When the soprano moves down again the childlike rhythm breaks:

Twinkle, twinkle, twinkle, little star

You are.

The upper voices have been coalescing into rather grand chords. At the very end the flowing sixteenth notes in the bass shape themselves into a distinctive figure—the expressive figure from the recurring episode, the figure with the dissonant échappée [bars 34, 35]. The fugue ends by “rhyming” with its central cadence, enhanced by this new reminiscence, spoken in an undertone: restrained, like all the rest of the music, but telling.

From the diaries of Cosima Wagner we know that late in his life Richard Wagner admired Bach and especially The Well-Tempered Clavier. “The quintessence of Bach,” he called it, comparing the fugues to “the roots of words . . . in relation to other music it is like Sanskrit to other languages.”

One winter a fabulous series of soirées at Haus Wahnfried, the Wagner mansion in Bayreuth, was given over to the whole of the WTC, six preludes and fugues per evening, with Josef Rubin­stein and Liszt playing and Wagner holding forth. “R. describes the 17th fugue [A-flat Major] as a dance, and traces a few steps to the first bars, then says it is freer in form, already approach­ing the sonata,” Cosima writes. This seems a little off for our fugue—Cosima may have confused the number. But another of her comments, “R. cannot praise highly enough the remarkable singing quality of the figurations,” referring to the WTC in gen­eral, might have been prompted by the sixteenth-note figures of the Fugue in A-flat Major. (Wagner specifically related his “unending melody” to another WTC fugue, the Fugue in F-sharp Minor from book 2. An essay by Christian Thorau discusses the aptness of this choice at length.)

__________________________________________________________________