The Art of Fugue. Bach Fugues for Keyboard, 1715 –1750. Chapter 6.

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 6

Contrapunctus 10

The Art of Fugue

Contrapunctus 10 from The Art of Fugue is a strange composite work of rare beauty, with two subjects.

Section 1: Bars 1–22

The singular rhetoric of the first subject—clipped three-note utterances, inverted and contrasted, sinking down/springing up, circuitous/direct, dark/light, with the springing motion retraced, softened, and overshot by a rising scale: this fascinates and mystifies. Also mysterious is the subject’s trajectory, begin­ning on the seventh degree C♯, away from the tonic or dominant notes, the positions taken up by virtually all Bach fugues, and ending—where? Roger Bullivant remarks of this “vague” sub­ject, “left to its own devices the result would hardly be a true fugue.” Perhaps, but what matters is not the truth but the multi­fariousness of fugue. When we need to distinguish between the two subjects of Contrapunctus 10 we can call this one the “enig­matic subject.”

Upward scales in eighth notes, spanning the intervals of a seventh and a ninth, echo one another and become an unfor­gettable feature of Contrapunctus 10. The first of these scales is demarcated by a high C♮ that makes for both climax and also a feeling of constraint, after the scale’s initial sense of release (D↗C; bar 3). C♮ also abrogates that initial C♯, so that the music can tilt toward the subdominant—and it is the subdominant, G minor, that accommodates the answer (not the dominant). This casts a sober shadow over what is already a very heterodox fugal exposition.

After the answer the soprano inverts the scale, as though to cradle the two remaining entries of the four-part exposition. These entries confound expectation by arriving in inversion and also in stretto. A link leads to further entries, now in a closer stretto: the recto subject answered by the inversion [bars 14–17]. Bach makes it look easy, this utterly improbable contrapuntal feat that throws up new expressive chords on almost every beat. Anyone who doubts the potential for eloquence inherent in the technical devices of fugue, such as inversion and stretto, should be won over by this page. Tovey called it “one of the profoundest and most beautiful Bach ever wrote.”

A few bars later there is a tear in the fabric of the com­position. The involved history of The Art of Fugue explains this. Bach’s original autograph manuscript transmits Contra­punctus 10 in an early version; both early and final versions became known as soon as the work appeared, since for some reason—perhaps because the versions are so different— both were included in the 1751 publication. While almost all modern editors omit (that is, suppress) the autograph version, it is included in a recent Bärenreiter edition edited by Klaus Hofmann, and also in the venerable Czerny edition of 1838, still in print. It began at bar 23 of the final version. The whole first section, Tovey’s profound and beautiful page, was a later addition.

Skip all of bars 1–22 in Contrapunctus 10, omit the bass and alto lines from bars 23–26, make two notational changes, and you have the version of Bach’s autograph, except for a few minor variants later.

Section 2: Bars 23–56

In the absence of titles for the fugues in Bach’s autograph, the early version of Contrapunctus 10 is often designated Fuga 6 (since it occupies the sixth position in that source, not the tenth), and this will be a convenient label for the discussion here.

Fuga 6 began at bar 23 of Contrapunctus 10, so it began with an orthodox exposition, setting forth a subject that inverts the basic theme of The Art of Fugue (introduced in Contrapunctus 1; see example 5a). This neutral-sounding fugue subject could hardly contrast more strongly with the enigmatic subject of Contrapunctus 10.

I have called the exposition of Fuga 6 orthodox, but it is in fact unusually relaxed. The high-flying soprano accompaniment to the answer in the tenor drops out at once, never becoming a regular countersubject. Bach writes free counterpoint for the remaining entries, flowing, seamless, soaring, ever-new. Even­tually he settles on a common, even commonplace imitative figure gliding up and down the interval of a fourth in eighth notes, emerging on this occasion from the end of the subject [bars 33–37]. The same figure runs over from the fourth entry to the next episode [38–43]—now ornamented, rather surprisingly, with a trill—and shapes several others.

How does this sit in Contrapunctus 10, after the extra page has been added to precede it? Not altogether well. The added voices in bars 23–26 are crude and unlovely; I cannot believe that Bach was responsible for this join. (One can play the piece with an elision, as in example 7.) Also there is something slack about the succession of ideas. The rich, involuted first section of the work extends for 22 bars—and 22 bars later the second section has hardly got past its mild, relaxed exposition; the music is per­fect in itself, but the contrast is unsettling. It is not like Bach to proceed from complex to simple. The relaxed exposition in Fuga 6 feels lax in Contrapunctus 10.

Get over it! as of course we do, when the music picks up energy with the next entry, in the alto [bars 44–48]. In Fuga 6 this alto entry brought with it low sonorities for the first time, and a new feeling of gravity, set against the very high, airy beginning. If we are playing or listening to Contrapunctus 10, we will recognize the counterpoint offered by the tenor at this point. It is the original enigmatic subject. Or at least, we should recognize it; with the line hidden away in an inner voice, it could be missed by listeners and even, possibly, by some players.

And how did this sit in Fuga 6? What in bar 44 of Contra­punctus 10 returns as something old and known, namely the original enigmatic subject, presents itself in bar 22 of Fuga 6 as something new: a new, belated countersubject, a configura­tion less likely to strike the listener as enigmatic than simply obscure. Absent the first page of Contrapunctus 10, it sounds like another quasi-improvisational addition to the contrapuntal web accruing around the Art of Fugue subject. Attention will likely focus at this point on a prominent ascending line in the bass.

Even at the next entry, this obscure countersubject is only beginning to peck its way out of the surrounding counterpoint [bars 53–56].

The difficult birth requires special measures, anticipated by the fast-moving line accompanying the original answer to the Art of Fugue subject [bars 26–30]. As we have seen, this line did not become a countersubject at that point; it is probably too exuber­ant to fulfill that function (and the little rhythmic spurt in bar 27 too volatile). It has a special dramatic role to play. In a tentative form, it begins by infiltrating those episodes built on the gliding figure [bars 43, 49–51], hunting for a way back into the fugue after having missed its chance—something it achieves in the next, much more powerful episode.

Bars 56–65

Many so-called episodes in fugues are less than “episodic”; they function not as interludes but as links or transition. Links are often required—from a subject entry to an important cadence, for example. Other episodes are more than episodic; the episode of bars 56–65 drives the fugue. As the voices led by the tenor in bar 56 march around the circle of fifths, the style changes subtly: the music runs more simply now, in two voices only (some of the time), harmonically repetitious, and more sinewy, with the flowing line itself newly shaped for action.

What the episode is leading to is the emergence of the obscure countersubject (or, the reemergence of the enigmatic subject) into the light of day—its emancipation, in a sense. This happens only when its gnomic opening utterances and then its upward scale, with its always expressive span of a seventh, stand out high in the soprano [bars 66–70]. Later it will stand out again in the soprano and also in the bass, that is to say, in both outer voices [bars 75–79, 85–89, 103–7]. And emancipation entails a new modality. At bar 63 the high note A in the bass transforms the span of a minor ninth—the heart and soul of the line since its first appearance—into a major ninth (the upward scale G↗A). This is something of a turning point. From here on, remarkably, the piece stays in the major mode for almost the whole of its course; somewhat late, it also turns to new keys, but in a strange way this counts for less than the new modality.

Bars 66–98

We arrive upon the diffused climax of the fugue, a plateau comprising three entries of the combined subjects—the Art of Fugue subject and the once-enigmatic, once-obscure, now-emancipated subject—and three episodes. The former subject actually appears each time at the same pitches, in one octave or another (except for one pitch in bar 85), and the episodes bear a strong family resemblance, in that each consists of sequences of two-bar units and each hinges on the same rhythm, an upbeat of three eighth notes. It now becomes clear that Bach fashioned the subjects to combine in invertible counterpoint of many kinds, that is, at many intervals. They go together when one or the other is doubled in thirds or sixths, and even when both are (as nearly happens in bars 102–7). The possibilities are endless. After a slow start, Contrapunctus 10 shows off these contrapuntal devices as clearly and joyfully as any other fugue I can think of (the classic case is the Fugue in G Minor from the WTC, book 2).

One cause for the expansive new mood has already been mentioned, the new modality; in later entries the harmony is predominantly major, though the Art of Fugue subject itself may maintain its minor-mode form. Another cause is the sensuous, almost buttery quality of the strings of thirds and sixths as they surge together and pull apart, in a sort of mobile double helix. (This texture has been heard before, in bars 16–20. It has reminded one German critic of waltzes by Johann Strauss, Jr.) Once the scale that moves up through a seventh is doubled in thirds, so that it covers a ninth—as in bar 87—it registers expansion rather than constraint, as it did before. The sobriety that marked the first page of Contrapunctus 10 yields to opulence and play.

As to the episodes: though closely related, they grow succes­sively more complex and—Tovey’s word—profound.

• Bars 70–74: While the first of the three episodes makes use of the gliding scale figure covering a fourth, once again, this always glides up, never down, taking wing up to high C at the very top of Bach’s keyboard. Inasmuch as the figure emerges from the conclusion of both the sub­ject and the countersubject [bar 69], this episode is heard very directly in reference to the immediately preceding entry, as a celebration of its breakthrough.
• Bars 79–84: The second episode blurs its underlying struc­ture by means of a wonderfully skillful lyric gesture in the soprano. It shifts the new three-note upbeat motif—which already feels more purposeful than that of the first episode— to another position in the sequential unit. Example 8a attempts to elucidate this. The actual soprano line from the score has been extracted and printed with stems pointing down, while the strict sequence that was Bach’s starting point is shown with dotted stems pointing up.
• Bars 89–98: The third episode blurs its sequential nature further. Example 8b, an explanatory score of a different kind, X-rays the full texture to show only notes that I read as functional—the three-note figure of a turn leading to one or more leaps of a fourth—in whatever voices they come. Everything else has been omitted from example 8b . . . except for the murmuring chromatic notes that blur things further yet, and the masterly final transformation of both the turn figure and the leap: these are details I could not leave out. Bach, like his God, is in the details.

What is moving as well as masterly about the third episode is the (retrospective) resonance with the first section of Contrapunctus 10, the added page. In broad terms, the fugue finally regains that page’s richness, depth, and intricacy. More specif­ically, it finally picks up on the resource of inversion explored there, bringing together the opening sinking-down motif and its springing-up inversion — in ornamented versions: perhaps we recognize them as such only when Bach begins to stress the inversion and isolates it by an evocative rest [bars 94, 96–97], as the sequential unit accelerates from two bars to one (indicated in example 8b by extended barlines). The present five-note fig­ure softens and demystifies the original three-note motif.

Bars 98–120

The third episode ends with a sigh. Its material is exhausted or, one would prefer to say, has fully realized its potential and its function by the time of the cadence in bar 98. Though a half cadence, this is perhaps the strongest (least gentle) in the whole piece, echoing similar cadences in bars 22, 56, and 79.

One could hardly conceive of a single episode continuing through the manifest break in bar 98, switching from G minor to B-flat major and from one motif to another. What we have after the cadence is a transition from the cadence to the next entry, a transition that also achieves something like a delicate recapitulation, for bars 98–102 retrace 48–52—down to the ten­tative intrusion of the flowing figure spanning a ninth that first appeared in 28–31. The flowing figure, which plays so salient a role in the fugue, which reached its apogee in bars 56–66 and has not been heard from since, comes back at full force after the entry [bars 107–11]. Then free imitation produces one more beautiful “episode,” a new transition to the final entry and the tonic key.

Contrapunctus 10 begins, for me, in mystery and ends with a small mystery of a different sort. The fugue’s final entry does return to the “home” key (and mode), D minor, in its first and last bars—with strong F-major and B-flat-major sonorities between, however [bars 107–14]. One would have expected some propping-up of the tonic in the closing bars. Yet even as the bass establishes the first strong cadence (A↘D) in the whole fugue, the tenor hesitates to admit finality, and when it does, the piece stops short on the second beat of the final bar.

Even with the fermata that Bach writes on that beat, this makes for the most understated final cadence in The Art of Fugue. I struggle to make out what it is saying, or declining to say, about the music it terminates.

Still, more than almost any other Bach fugue, Contrapunctus 10 will reveal new secrets as one plays and studies it again and again. (The Art of Fugue “must, indeed, be played many times before its deceptive lucidity can be penetrated,” writes Charles Rosen.) The trills at bars 39–41, for example, though they seem surprising at first, can be seen and heard to anticipate another trill at bar 47—a functional trill, in that as written for Fuga 6, it adds definition to the obscure countersubject and confirms a new terminus for it. A similar series of trills also appears at another point in The Art of Fugue, in Contrapunctus 3. What is the aesthetic weight, if any, of such interfugue similarities? There are other points in Contrapunctus 10 that seem to reach out beyond the immediate text: at bars 3, 23–28, 31–35 (recalling Contrapunctus 1), and 119–20, to cite a few. To say nothing of the rhythmic identity between those clipped three-note utterances, sinking down/springing up, dark/light, and the hieratic, almost counterintuitive rendition of the Art of Fugue subject in Contra­puncti 8 and 11.

To pursue these nuances, one would have to dip into the long-standing debate about “cyclicity” in The Art of Fugue as a whole. Is this formidable work to be experienced as a single large cyclic unit, rather than (or in addition to) a series of dis­tinct entities, and if so, just how—what kind of cyclicity? One would be drawn to all the other fugues, fugues outside the pur­view of this short book, and the canons. A prospect to welcome. Do not take Bullivant seriously when he insists that “The Art of Fugue is a complete work whose individual numbers make sense only as parts of the whole” and calls the musical evidence for this “overwhelming.” There is no such evidence at all for Fuga 6, and only the most tendentious argument can be made for Contrapunctus 10 (or Contrapunctus 1).

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