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.

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Chapter 15
Fugue in B-flat Major
The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2

 

Writing on the Fugue in B-flat Major, Hermann Keller found the countersubjects “handled in an indolent, almost casual manner, in no way disturbing the serene unconcern of this fugue.” These adjectives work rather well for the character of the piece in general, not only for the treatment of the countersubjects, though it’s important to supplement them with another set of adjectives, adjectives like artful, elegant, and sly. Keller says that its performance should be “lightly animated, with grace and some humor.” This work is one of Bach’s more subtle inventions—a light-hearted fugue for connoisseurs, we should probably acknowledge, one that also labors under a further handicap, that of sharing space with one of the composer’s most radiant (and longest) preludes.

Indolent: the lazy stream of sound begins with the fugue subject itself, a strictly continuous series of even notes in a moderate tempo. In slow tempo, a continuously moving subject can make a fugue sound grave and monumental (the Fugue in F Minor from The Well-Tempered Clavier, book 1), in fast tempo, brilliant (see example 2), and in moderate tempo, gently somnolent. The placid surface should not be allowed to hide the tough fugal structure below and its sophisticated contrapuntal manipulations.

Sly: while this subject is decidedly anomalous in opening on a pitch other than the tonic or the dominant—something that puts every commentator on alert—in this rhythmic situation one barely notices, so fluent is the motion. And of course the off-the-tonic, off-the-downbeat opening contributes to the fluency, a point particularly evident if one compares this fugal opening, on the supertonic, C, to the only other one in the WTC with a similar anomaly, F-sharp Major from book 2, with its zany trill on the hypersensitive seventh degree (example 20).

But most sly and artful of all is the phrase leading to the very strong cadence in the middle of this fugue—actually, not halfway through, more like a third [bars 29–32]. It is a phrase that seems to have migrated from another sound world, another era. More than one passage in the WTC shows Bach’s interest in the music of sensibility, the empfindsamer Stil associated with his son Carl Philipp Emanuel, which grew up as a reaction to perceived severities of the Baroque. This is what Tovey had in mind when he spoke of a “homophonic crotchet bass” in this phrase and said it should be played “with the repeated notes nearly tied,” so as to evoke the clavichord Bebung or vibrato effect favored by the younger generation.

Instead of flowing, the music here begins to slide, as though the only-too-well-established eighth-note motion were imperiled by the diminished fifth F↘(D)↘B♮ outlined by the bass [bars 28–29], and the voice now needed to stabilize itself by means of steady quarter notes. Over this precarious-sounding foundation, the upper voices—suddenly aerated by rests—continue on their insouciant way, with a brisk little rhythmic snap in the soprano [bar 31]. The alto voice compounds the problem with its A♭ and then tries to put on the brakes with its long E♮. There are spicy harmonic details in bars 30 and 31: a progression from a diminished fifth to an augmented fourth (B–F/B♭–E) and a dissonant échappée note A.

No, what is most sly is how easily we find ourselves adjusting to the fugue’s basic fluent style when the unsettling moment is past. We wonder whether we’ve been daydreaming. David Schulenberg suggests that the cadence “sounds a little pat, entering a bit too suddenly,” but I think not. The effect has been anticipated, locally by the chromatic slippage in bars 26–27, and by the extraordinary dropping out of the upper voices in bar 28.

It has also been anticipated by broader rhythmic factors. With so fluent a gait, this music will either lull the listener into pleasant inattention or make her especially alert to the slightest rhythmic deviations. One call to attention is the syncopation followed by a pair of eighth notes in bar 8; Riemann noted that this figure blossoms in the fugue’s longest episode, some sixty bars later—a reference that will give the specially alert listener special satisfaction. Another slight deviation is more immediate, the iambic pattern (quarter note/half note) introduced as a rhythmic contrast in the first episode. Bar 19 holds it in our memory, and it slows the movement in bars 25–27 and 28. Bar 31 offers a diminution, in that rhythmic snap. Artful again.

With so striking a central cadence, in the dominant, we know that the same striking cadence will return at the end of the work, transposed into the tonic. “Rhyming” cadences of this kind are a feature of binary compositions and fugues that borrow from them.

Section 1: Bars 1–32

The structure of the subject allows for many subtleties. (Is it too sly to suggest that the two motifs in it, presented in different sorts of sequence, are making mild fun of standard Baroque figures for warfare and pathos, respectively?) Originally presented in the configuration a a b b, elsewhere the a and b motifs are reconfigured. The pattern b a seems especially piquant at the big cadences [bars 29–30, 90–91]. The pattern a b a b a b b will add sinew to the fugue’s longest episode [69–75].

And bar 9 introduces a slight variant of a; it would be fussy to distinguish this, if not for the fact that the inversion at the end of the variant usually points in some interesting direction: a leap of a fifth, echoing the new fifth in the answer [bars 9, 11], a downward seventh [12, 45], an unexpected A♭ [14], a sustained high F [21].

Section 1 of the fugue is short, simple, and notably lucid. A lot of space opens up between the bass and the upper voices. There are only four subject entries, and the countersubjects could not be simpler or more elegant. The one in the alto is little more than a long sustained note, and the one in the soprano consists of a long limping scale mirroring the first half of the subject while doubling the second half of the subject in tenths and sixths [bars 13–17]. These primitive countersubjects invert neatly to the soprano and alto respectively [21–24].

 

Section 2: Bars 32–93

After the fugue’s central cadence, combination of the subject with new, contrasting counterpoints articulates the beginning of a second section. They turn out to be true countersubjects, for although after their first appearance they tend to click in late—almost casually, as Keller put it—they persist quite audibly for many more entries and experience many more different inversions than do their opposite numbers in the fugue’s first section.

(New—yet these countersubjects are also artfully linked to earlier material:

• The slow one, in the bass, augments the bass of the immediately preceding cadence [bars 30–31, 32–36].
• The other draws its syncopation and two-eighth-note figure from bar 8. Its entire line, in fact, is foreshadowed in bars 6–9, and what might be viewed as the fully realized form of this countersubject opens with the half-inverted variant of the first motif from bar 9 [40, 65].
• At one point in section 2, Bach winks at section 1, where the motif entered variously on the subject’s first or second bar, by bringing it on both the first and the second bar of an entry [14, 21, 54–55].)

The texture now becomes markedly denser. Contrapuntal inversions of the combined subject and countersubjects are worked out in unusually fertile and elegant ways. By the time of book 2 of the WTC, Bach was losing interest in those clearly organized sequential episodes, designed to return in strict contrapuntal inversion, which play so large a role in book 1—starting with the often-cited Fugue in C Minor. In the middle of the present fugue, five separate subject entries are spaced out by transitional passages, none of which crystallizes out as a clearly defined unit, ringing endless changes on the thematic material [bars 32–67].

This is rich fare and, dare I say, somewhat hard to digest. The invention is fabulous, and the saturation impressive. But as the subject drifts smoothly and systematically through many keys—from B-flat major to G minor, E-flat major, and C minor—I think Keller is right to find something indolent in the regular turnover of entries and spacing material, all at three-, four-, or five-bar intervals—eight units, in all. I can sense a sort of generalized purposefulness at this point in the composition; I miss an overall sense of purpose.

However this may be, this dense music provides a foil for Bach’s next move: to bring the piece to an end with altogether new expansiveness, and even a show of new power. The control of pace here is as notable as the contrapuntal virtuosity in the previous bars. At this juncture Bach writes two longer phrases running into the “rhyming” cadence. The first of them contains an episode that is very well calculated, simple as it may look on the page [bars 67–75]: the sheer length of it, relative to the rest of the fugue, the contented rumble of the bass, released from its involved contrapuntal transactions, and the familiar, friendly circle-of-fifths harmonic progression—all this leads firmly, broadly, and with a certain formality to a moment of rest on the dominant.

Then the fugue takes a gulp of air before launching into the final subject entry, an answer starting from high G [bars 78–81]. The sense of new breadth is maintained beautifully, as the subject is now drawn out for longer than four bars. This is not the first time Bach has created this effect with this subject, but it is especially striking on this occasion because the slow countersubject in the bass appears to slip out of synch and move ahead by one bar, thus refusing to close off the subject. The subject also refuses to close off itself, proliferating by means of a deliberate sequence to a cadence in G minor. (Though to be sure, as this was the key of the first entry to move away from the tonic-dominant sphere [bars 47–51], one could say that something has been closed off, an area of modulation. G was the high note in bar 78.)

The creative energy seems limitless. In bar 86 the fugue’s signature motif a turns upward, through the lively interval of a sixth, not downward as on all previous occasions. A single broken chord adds a moment of impulsive sparkle. (Or does the token swelling of the texture here, prior to the final cadence, “invert” the emptying of texture prior to the central cadence [bars 88, 27–28]? That would be sly.) From the high G at the beginning of the last entry on, the wide-open texture characteristic of the fugue’s first section is restored and underscored.

A metaphor claims precedence, insists on its prerogatives, will not be hushed up. It figures our fugue as the outflow of a tiny spring, an indolent trickle in a single voice. The music swells into a stream, gathers volume, and flows merrily (that’s the word) before being dammed for a moment; that funky central cadence behaves like a man-made barrier to the natural force of Baroque polyphony. A sluice, perhaps, or a lock. Past this, the waters enter into a stretch of tricky rapids, where they eddy and surge into adjacent tonal territory. Then the stream, now a rivulet, runs smoothly again, and in broader channels, opening upon what has become an ample vista . . . until another, rhyming sluice completely stems the flow and inundates the metaphor.

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