The Art of Fugue. Bach Fugues for Keyboard, 1715 –1750. Chapter 7

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 7

Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, BWV 903

 

I have taken infinite pains to discover another piece of this kind by Bach, but in vain. This fantasia is unique, and never had its like. . . . This work, though of such intricate workmanship, makes an impression on even the most unpracticed hearer if it is but performed at all clearly.

This accolade in 1802 by Bach’s first biographer, J. N. Forkel, as translated into English only six years later, is echoed by George B. Stauffer, a musicologist who has studied the forty-odd surviving early manuscripts of the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue to find out what he can about its chronology—not too much, as is usually the case with Bach’s early music. An early version of the fantasy dates back to Bach’s Weimar years; the fugue may have been written later.

Stauffer reminds us that this is one Bach composition that never fell out of sight. Its flamboyance and freedom, pathos and furor recommended it to the age of Empfindsamkeit or sensibility in the late eighteenth century as well as to several ages of Romanticism in the nineteenth, resonating in the soundscapes of both the perfected clavichord and the fully developed modern piano. For virtuosi like Liszt and Busoni, this was the only Bach they performed at concerts as originally notated, without being tricked out for the modern instrument. In 1910 Heinrich Schenker put out an edition of the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue accompanied by a fifty-page monograph, still one of the most comprehensive discussions of any Bach fugue to be found in the musicological literature.

Fantasy

This work owes its fame principally to the fantasy, and of course this is only right. The fantasy is Bach at his most Baroque, Bach at his most extravagant, untrammeled, physical, in your face. The work is a useful corrective for those devotees of the composer drawn especially to the cool technical virtuosity that he liked to display in his later years—in The Musical Offering, The Art of Fugue, and works like the Fugue in E Major from The Well-Tempered Clavier, book 2. The Bach who daunted traveling virtuosos in contests of improvisation, the seething, fiery, histrionic Bach seldom shows himself so openly as in the Chromatic Fantasy.

The word “untrammeled” may raise eyebrows, since whatever Bach did in the heat of actual improvisation, what he wrote down always has a strong semblance of underlying order and precision. The overall harmonic framework of this particular assault on tonality is simplicity itself. As to rhythm, the ebb and flow of the storm after the opening pair of lightning bolts is controlled by various calculated patterns of three, five, six, and twelve sixteenth notes (not in that order) [bars 3–20], as Schenker showed, and Schenker supplied something similar himself when he composed his own arpeggios for the sequel, in which Bach simply used a shorthand of half-note chords with the instruction arpeggio [33–48]. Both Bach and Schenker were using musical notation to induce performances that would sound spontaneously varied.

It is in the arpeggiated passage that Bach begins to bring the most extreme of chromatic chord progressions . . . progressions not to be heard in fugues or Brandenburg Concertos . . . and he continues on the same course in the protracted section, marked “Recitativo,” that brings the fantasy to its superb dying close on a long tonic pedal [49–75, 75–79]. The music moans and rages with repetitions of short, slow figures, mostly upbeat-downbeat units in which the downbeats are typically the same plain descending step, whereas the upbeats, broken up into patterns of short notes, are wildly and fantastically various (example 9). There are about eleven such figures in the twenty-five bars of the recitative proper, and eight more in the closing passage over the tonic pedal. They would make for rhetorical overkill (even for the Baroque era) if not for Bach’s stupefying modulations.

Some commentators find the fugue something of a letdown after the fantasy, but this kind of feeling or judgment relies on false expectations, expectations derived from works like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony where the movements trace a self-consciously teleological course. There is a wide range of relationship between the “movements” that Bach wrote as introductions to fugues—fantasias, preludes—and the fugues themselves. (Sometimes he wrote them at different times and brought them together later; this is apparently the case with the Fantasy and Fugue in A Minor and may be the case here too.) They can be kindred as in the Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor and the Prelude and Fugue in A Minor from the Well-Tempered Clavier, book 2, or mysteriously remote as in E-flat Minor or F-sharp Minor from book 1. E-flat Major in book 1 has been a stumbling block for many. With the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, the metronomic motion of the fugue makes a grand overall rhythmic resolution for the fits and starts of the fantasy. As for extravagance and chromaticism, it is as extravagant as a fugue can be and as chromatic as a fast fugue can be.

And whereas some fantasia-fugue pairs stress the contrast between the spontaneous and the composed, in the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue the sense of improvisation lasts throughout the fugue itself. The radical modulations, the freedom of the figuration, the instability of both the fugue subject and the countersubject, the outbursts of homophony—all of this feels like inspiration found on the spur of the moment. It’s hard not to believe that the fugue originated as an improvisation, however much it was tightened up when Bach wrote it down. By writing it down Bach created a text, which players can practice and which critics have been exclaiming over since 1802. Whether he conceived of it as the same kind of text as that of a didactic fugue in the WTC or The Art of Fugue—a text to study and savor at leisure, rather than display as a trophy of improvisation—is another question.

Critics whose method includes “close readings” must always guard against overinterpretation, especially, of course, with texts implicated with performance of one kind or another. Homer and Shakespeare are examples. In music, important examples are jazz and the early keyboard (clavier and organ) works of Bach . . . each presenting different problems: with jazz we have recordings but usually no scores, and with Bach we have scores but can only imagine, never hear the actual improvisation. Such texts are not off-limits to criticism—they just require tact, above all, and a sharp awareness of the limitations of analysis. I do not think my usual critical method would have gotten very far with the Chromatic Fantasy; a little shakily, I come up to speed again with the Chromatic Fugue.

Fugue

We are of course dealing with a very different genre from The Well-Tempered Clavier—music for display rather than study, for spontaneous effect rather than learning or subtlety or refined detail. (Not that this piece lacks its own kind of subtlety.) It seems light-years ahead of other virtuoso fugues for keyboard left by Bach, such as two early works in A minor, BWV 894 and BWV 944, perpetuum mobile compositions with subjects in continuous sixteenth-note motion that persists throughout the episodes: see example 2. There is also a capacious Fugue in B Minor on a Theme by Albinoni, two versions of which (BWV 951 and 951a) can be found in the back pages of the Bach complete editions, a work with interesting points of contact with the Chromatic Fugue. These early fugues extend themselves by stamina, by means of multiple subject entries and generous (luxuriant, rambling) episodes in various keys. They have no recourse at all to fugal artifice, beyond invertible counterpoint.

The present fugue is a piece of this general type built on a subject with real rhythmic character, to say nothing of involuted melody and harmonic implications far beyond the range of those earlier efforts. On this outing Bach has rejected (or outgrown) the use of sheer whirl for purposes of brilliance and compass. The music achieves what Spitta called its “demoniacal rush” still without recourse to contrapuntal devices such as thematic combinations, stretto, inversion, and the like. Even the countersubject comes and goes casually.

The subject is highlighted at almost all of its appearances by being launched, as it were, by a strong preparatory cadence. Eight bars long, the subject appears eleven times. The piece as a whole runs to 161 bars, nearly five minutes in performance, twelve minutes including the Fantasy.

Subject and Answer: Bars 1–16

In a work of this sort, then, the subject counts for all, or nearly all. This subject keeps us on edge throughout, partly because it submits to so much variation, but also because it is so intriguing in itself, even cryptic—as Schenker chose to demonstrate by reducing it to the primal progression A G F E D [bars 1, 4, 6, 7, 8], noting how “the veil is lifted from a wondrous and profound mystery” (example 10a). “What inspired construction!!,” he adds.

The mystery lies not in the subject’s relatively modest chromaticism but in its ambivalent tonality. If fugue admits any axiom, it is that the subject defines the tonality, but heard in the abstract, this subject veers dangerously toward the dominant; the opening interval A–C [bars 1–2] defines not the tonic D minor but A minor, the dominant key. In this context E–G [3–4] has to suggest the dominant of the dominant, E minor, and E minor oversteps the range of D minor. (These very harmonies are spelled out later in transposition [bars 61–66], and elsewhere this first half of the subject is harmonized in many different ways, seldom in an unambiguous D minor or equivalent key.) Immediately the B♭ in bar 5 cancels obscurantist E-minor harmony. On B♭ the motif inverts grandly and cascades down to a very forceful D-minor cadence—compensation (overcompensation, perhaps?) for the mystification before.

We can now see how Schenkerian reduction obscures, sedates, and indeed betrays the dynamic process central not only to this fugue’s subject, but also to the way it will develop. The B♭ melodic peak will function as a crux globally as well as locally. In several later subject entries it generates an altogether unusual canon; in others it precipitates a breakdown of polyphonic texture into thick chords. And a sequence formed from the melodic peak detonates the biggest explosion in the whole of this highly combustible composition [bars 135–40].

The crux of bar 5 also inflects the fugue’s rhythmic structure. For with the help of an aggressive, dissonant trill in the countersubject, starting at bar 13, bar 5 earns the force of a downbeat—one that cuts across the normal downbeats, which come on the even bars (starting with bars 2 and 4) and which are strongly affirmed at key points later [bars 91, 132, 155]). The rogue accents invigorate the music and contribute to the overall drive.
Every entry of the subject “contains an element of uncertainty,” as A. E. F. Dickinson puts it in his book on Bach’s fugues. “The fugue is chromatic, then, per se.” The answer (a tonal answer) is lucid enough—it traces the intervals D↗G and B♮↗D—but it only comes twice. And the harmonic interval of a seventh between the beginning of the answer and the countersubject tells us at once that this is a fugue with a pretty short fuse [bar 9]. Hans von Bülow in his edition of the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue changed the answer so as to start on E and cancel the dissonance, understandably infuriating Schenker and fueling one of his many polemics.

Bars 17–97

The long first episode maps out well the scope of the fugue to come [bars 27–40]. But after its opening sally of upward fourths in the soprano, it seems to me both weak and peculiar—peculiar in thematic material: neither the left-hand thirds nor the motifs in bars 36–40 seem to belong in this fugue—in harmony: the overlong circles of fifths—and especially in form: the key of F major established with considerable formality, then quitted at once. This looks to me less like a relic of improvisation than scar tissue from early surgery performed on this score, even earlier than the first of the three versions described by Stauffer. Bach may have contemplated an entry in F, though it is hard to see how he could have twisted the subject into the major mode. Another unique and defining feature of the Chromatic Fugue is that it introduces its subject nearly a dozen times with never any mode change.

In entry 4 [bars 41–49], the next after the exposition and the long first episode, what feels like an improvisatory variation of the subject turns out to be the start of a purposeful process, the dismantling of the fugue subject in several stages. Bach varies the subject at the melodic peak, softening it with appoggiatura eighth notes. These expressive diminutions would spell pathos in any other context; here they have a strange grasping effect, and they sound even stranger in entry 5 [bars 59–66]—almost uncanny, I feel—when the softened crux is echoed by a canon at the octave between the alto and the soprano (example 10b). Then the rest of the subject simply withers away in both voices.

Did Bach consider the cadence of the original subject too grand and forceful, too final-sounding for general use? The cadence was already obscured in entry 4, and in all later entries it is virtually smothered with faster matter or omitted altogether.

Entry 5 is contorted further, as to rhythm and harmony alike. A solidly launched bass A in bar 60 shifts accents from the subject’s second bar to its first; this regularizes accents on the odd bars—on the melodic peak and the beginning of the canon (the original cadential accent on the even beat has evanesced). The low A also clouds what is actually a tonic entry by means of a strong dominant (reinforced, when the entry returns in this form later, as a pedal [bar 108]).

In entry 6 [bars 76–83] the subject is undermined some more: for once it is not “launched,” the contour of the opening measure is blurred, and the harmony reels dangerously—until the crux, a turning point once again. The subject cadences in the distant key of B minor.

And entry 7 marks a further breakdown, yet at the same time a manifest climax, the Chromatic Fugue’s first really extraordinary moment.

The key is E minor (no stranger to this work, as we have seen), and E-minor harmony is frozen by a dominant pedal B positioned, this time, to stress the subject’s second bar [91]—an accent blown out of the water by the accent on bar 94 at the arrival of the crux, now presented as a cannonade of fat chords of up to eight notes shattering the three-part contrapuntal texture. Meanwhile the countersubject, which began decaying in the previous entry, melts down into continuous sixteenth-note figures—up to the melodic peak, where its principal idea suddenly reappears, a scale in marching rhythm (dactyls or anapests). It proceeds down two octaves in the bass, after ratcheting up the harmony under the melodic peak into a minor ninth chord. Eventually the marching bass line will be played by the left hand in octaves, a forecast of Lisztian bravura that must have fascinated musicians of the nineteenth century [bars 158–59].

For Schenker, the collapse into raw homophony has been meticulously prepared:

Bach would not have been the master he was, and indeed this profusion of voices would be unconvincing—like a mere whim—had he not provided detailed advance preparation of the effect he wished to achieve. One should note the uninterrupted, agitated sixteenth notes in bars 87–93 and the threatening organ point that begins in bar 91! And finally, the most inspired stroke: Bach intentionally deletes the last eighth note in bar 4 of the subject, as if forcibly stifling the voice-leading’s drive toward a purely contrapuntal continuation!

Some nineteenth-century editors put the eighth note back, to Schenker’s renewed exasperation. Harmony, the subject, the countersubject, and even counterpoint itself break down in the service of climax. Bach’s deletion makes for an earthier, stomping quality in the crux, and it is no accident that this is the first time since near the beginning of the fugue, several minutes earlier, that the subject sounds out loud and clear in the soprano.

The episodes, past the first two, have exhibited a flamboyance that rivals that of the subject entries themselves. The episode emerging from entry 4 is a composite of two ideas [bars 49–58], both making a vivid textural contrast with the regular fugal texture (something Bach does not allow in the more compact fugues of the WTC). The two ideas—arpeggiated chords on the one hand, and a torrent of continuous sixteenth notes, doubled in thirds or sixths, on the other—also contrast sharply with each other. Then, soon after entry 5, a clear cadence launches a lively episode that is something like a false stretto ahead of entry 6—another flamboyant gesture [bars 72–75]. Note the touch of diminution. This tricky preparation helps undermine the entry, along with other factors already mentioned.

Bars 97–161

For all of its arsenal of climax-inducers, entry 7, poised in its distant key, must obviously still be some way from any contemplated final point of rest. What better to defuse the tension at this point—pour mieux sauter—than a return of the arpeggios of the texture-inspired episode [bars 97–106]. Entry 8 arrives in due course, with fine new elaborations [107–14], and, if the next episode [115–30] feels a little generic, what is mainly needed here is a fairly long span of time and general circling of the tonic key. One can feel the fugue approaching its final climax in D minor.

And one has to echo Schenker: what inspired construction! and doubly inspired on account of the music’s implication with improvisation. Entry 9, beginning on D and biased toward D by another pedal, turns inevitably toward its proper key, G minor (see example 11). This is the subdominant—definitely not where

the fugue can end. In an explosive gust of spontaneity, Bach takes the crux and its motif, now loaded up with thick chords and the marching figure, rams it through to the soprano, and sequences the whole complex up from the subdominant past the tonic to the dominant, A. This sequence (E♭ D C B♭ . . . ∫ F E♮ D C♯ . . . ) has the effect of trumping the canon that blurred the end of entries 5 and 8. What registers so strongly is the grand, scrunching sound of the two dominant ninth chords, V9 of iv and V9 of v [bars 135, 139]. While the harmonic progression is not the same as the by now familiar progression leading into the crux, it is not unrelated, and to me it feels like the preordained outcome of that crucial sound, its exultant apotheosis.

If we can imagine Bach improvising the Chromatic Fugue we can also imagine him saving the lowest bass entry for the point directly after this great climax. Very powerful are the successive accents on bars 139 and 140—and while the bass entrance in bar 140 may be premature and impulsive in respect to the sequence of bars 135–38, it is majestically on time in respect to the pedal initiated at bar 132. This lowest bass entry, accompanied by a spontaneous new counterpoint of rushing scales, is answered by the highest soprano entry, with left-hand octaves below [bars 154–60].

The subject counts for all in this fugue. The superb, impatient flourish at the end stresses the original rhythmic terminus of the subject, as does the afterbeat.

 

A recommended recording on YouTube: Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue

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