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 2
Fugue in C Minor
The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1
Bach’s very best-known fugue must be the Fugue in C Minor from book 1 of The Well-Tempered Clavier. It has become standard teaching material in advanced and elementary textbooks alike, for courses in canon and fugue as well as lowly Music Appreciation. It was the first fugue to be jazzed and the first to be switched on. Heinrich Schenker, lord and master of modern music theory, settled on it as the example to expound in a classic essay, “Organicism in Fugue,” which recently provoked an entire critical chapter from Laurence Dreyfus in his book Bach and the Patterns of Invention. When The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians dropped Roger Bullivant’s solid article “fugue” from its second edition, what replaced it was (among other things) a blow-by-blow analysis of the Fugue in C Minor.
There is a manuscript copied by one of Bach’s students containing analytical annotations to this work. (Some are given by David Schulenberg in The Keyboard Music of J. S. Bach.) “For the use and improvement of musical youth eager to learn,” reads the title page for the WTC; did the Fugue in C Minor occupy a special place in the composer’s personal curriculum?
One can even detect a mild backlash as regards the piece, as when Bullivant reaches the chapter on fugal form in his book on fugue and says he will look “not at the standard examples (WTC I C-Minor is the great favorite for an introduction to Bach’s technique, WTC I C-Major being, for good reasons, beyond the understanding of the conventional theorist!) but at some of the more ‘difficult’ and, it is hoped, interesting forms.” Assuming that Bach wanted to exhibit something minimal at (or very near) the beginning of his exemplary collection of preludes and fugues, C Minor indeed presented itself as a prime candidate.
Bullivant does not fail to note points of interest in this less-than-difficult composition, such as a “humorous fake entry” as early as bar 6 and the hidden entry of the subject at what sounds like the halfway mark of a sequential episode [bar 11]; compare also bar 20.
One might add to these points Bach’s astute choice of exactly the most incisive features of the subject from which to build the first episode, namely the downward leap of a sixth and the syncopation near the end of the subject. This episode returns later in another key and another contrapuntal inversion [bars 5–6, 17–19]; a second episode also returns, in this case without inversion [9–10, 22–23]. Recurring episodes are an attractive feature of this fugue and similar ones in the WTC.
Astute—and I think we could also call it ideally didactic. “Like this, like this, like this,” Bach is saying in the threefold sequence of bars 5–6. If Bach planned this early item in the WTC for teaching purposes, he must be suspected of the eighteenth- century equivalent of dumbing down . . . but then or now, this is a process that need by no means be unsophisticated. What is interesting is the way exaggerated simplicity coexists here with a whole array of skillful details.
For example, bars 13–14 may seem like a heavy-handed lesson in the treatment of scales in contrary motion. Yet the bland left-hand thirds are derived with a sort of exasperated wit from the near-continuous thirds just previously, themselves due to a revision in the second countersubject to make it work in the major mode (in the first half of bar 12, strict inversion would require eighth notes C B♭ A♭ B♭ in the alto).
Those countersubjects plod—as Bach must have wanted. And when Hermann Keller spoke of the music’s “easy comprehensibility” he may have had in mind the unusually simple parade of two-bar phrases (subject, episode, subject, episode, and so on) at the start and throughout the first half of the composition. But once the later episodes become extended [bars 17–19, 22–26], the later entries sound freer and stronger. Another fine touch is the bold, energizing octave transposition of the second countersubject in bar 21.
Keller was right: it is the subject in this fugue that everyone finds reizend, charming, spirited, piquant, perky. Its gavotte-like rhythm permeates the whole piece. Only the “Little” G Minor Fugue for Organ has, for organists at least, a subject with the same sort of charisma. It is possible to feel that a tune like this should not be saddled with countersubjects that deflect attention. And it is not.
As the commentators all remark, the Fugue in C Minor demonstrates contrapuntal inversion very well, with five of the six possible permutations of the subject (s), countersubject 1 (cs 1), and countersubject 2 (cs 2) clearly on display:
As this table illustrates, fugue gives composers a perfect way to show how a rich contrapuntal complex of subject and one or more countersubjects can be built up, step by step, from simple beginnings, and then to show off the same complex in many different lights. The subject sings out in the soprano or half-hides in the alto or supports the whole complex in the bass. The same basic harmonies will be heard over and over again, always with a slightly different nuance.
This fugue also teaches about the conventional closure of minor-mode music in the major, by altering the interval of a minor third in its final tonic chord into the more conclusive major third (the so-called tierce de Picardie; here C + E♮). Again, the lesson is unsubtle, with the Picardy third highlighted by its position (the top voice) and linear preparation (the scale fragment outlining a spiky diminished fourth, A♭ G F E♮).
It seems a little strange, in fact, that this decidedly didactic fugue, which is nearly the shortest in the whole of the Well-Tempered Clavier, should reach so lofty a conclusion—the rhetorical stop, the grandiose chordal statement of the subject [bars 28, 29–31]. We may be inclined to hear these gestures as a response to improvisational flourishes at the end of the preceding Prelude in C Minor. Or something like self-parody may be involved here, I like to think, a wry glance at impressive organ voluntaries that Bach had written in earlier years, such as the Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor, works driven by the Baroque dialectic of extravagance and order, fantasy and craft. Typically, in these works, flamboyant preludes prepare the ground for sober fugues with brilliant virtuosic flourishes at the end.
Coming at the front of the book, the Fugue in C Minor serves as a model for a number of others with lively, dance-like subjects and prominent recurring episodes, but they all close in quite a different spirit, with an epigram derived wittily from some previous material. To be sure, these similar pieces are almost all in the major mode. Examples in book 1 are the Fugues in E-flat, E, F-sharp, and B-flat Major.
In many fugues it is necessary to change the subject slightly at its second appearance so as to smooth over the move from one tonality, the tonic, momentarily to another, the dominant. The tonal answer, as this is called, being a little different than the subject, it gives the composer an extra element to work with; one could say that in the Fugue in C Minor the fifth-leap G↘C of the answer [bar 3] adds a bit of steel to the fourth-leap C↘G of the subject and suggests a sequence with A↘D in the next bar. But this is just a detail; Bach uses the tonal answer only one more time. The technicalities of tonal answering loom too large in the analysis of fugues. Ebenezer Prout’s great treatise on fugue of 1891 requires two whole pages for “Answer” in the index, the longest item by far. The art of fugue lies in a nexus of long-range continuity and rhetoric, well past the stage of local joinery.
A recommended recording on YouTube:
J.S. Bach: Prelude and Fugue in C minor (WTC, Book I, No. 2), BWV 847.
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