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 9
Fugue in E Major
The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2
The conventional form diagrams and tables of music pedagogy give or can give the wrong impression of an art we experience as a process (or stasis) in time. Diagrams intrude on listening by asserting their own kind of direct linearity. They announce major articulations and endings ahead of time, before they have been suggested in sound, and offer unambiguous ground plans for patterns in time that are existential and often tenuous. But with some misgivings I do offer a tabular analysis in this case, to make what seems to me a capital point about this famous and famously beautiful fugue, “one of the clearest in intention ever written,” according to A. E. F. Dickinson in his book Bach’s Fugal Works.
What Dickinson seems to have been alluding to in his gnomic way (but nobody else talks about it at all) was the unusually strong segmentation of this music into long parallel phrases. Phrases of virtually the same length, demarcated by very sonorous cadences, all start in the same way, with closely knit four-part expositions of the subject. Past the opening, these expositions are pressed into various strettos; after a time the rich cadences begin to echo one another, like the slow chime of the big gong in a gamelan. A very large hypermeter makes itself felt, at least vaguely comparable to that of a composition in theme-and-variation form—a theme followed by several variations. Segmentation of this kind is particularly impressive in so compact a composition.
Parallelism breaks down in phrase 4, of course, under the pressure of events, when an extra stretto (stretto 4) stirs up the fugue’s climax of involution. Yet this single extended phrase also begins with a stretto in all four voices, stretto 3 [bars 23–26]—and for a while, if you are not looking at a diagram, you could take it for another “variation.”
Phrase 1: Bars 1–9
Starting in the bass, the exposition proceeds through successively higher and higher voices, in a hypermeter of three whole notes: see example 13a. Both features make for a feeling of quiet grandeur, offset by the more active countersubject. The rising scale in quarter notes in this countersubject, the eighth-note snap B↘F♯↗B, and the syncopated half notes—these will all work magic over the course of the Fugue in E Major. What is left of the phrase consists of a spacious cadence on the dominant, a peaceful gesture, coming as it does so close to the beginning of the composition.
Phrase 2 (stretto 1): Bars 9–16
The next phrase brings the first of the strettos. Stretto 1, like the others, is laid out symmetrically in voice pairs: two voices are introduced as a pair at a close stretto interval—a very close one in this case, a single whole note—followed after a time by the other two, in the same disposition. The music does not depart from the tonic key.
The rest of phrase 2 is saturated by the countersubject, generally with the characteristic eighth-note snap smoothed out and made lyrical—a free augmentation. This burgeons into an ample canon or stretto of its own, in all four voices; Bach’s strategy is to stress the countersubject at the beginning of the fugue, drop it out of the middle, and restore it in its integral form at the end.
Two strettos this soon in the piece would seem to presage some complexity, but both the augmentation and the way the soprano is laid out tend to minimize any potential developmental energy. So at the second cadence there is again an unusually peaceful feeling at an early point in the proceedings, in spite of the modulation to C-sharp minor. (This feeling may owe something to the long, almost dreamlike line in ascending quarter notes that can be traced in bars 12–15 by shunting back and forth among the octaves: sixteen steps from E♯ up to G♯.)
Phrase 3 (stretto 2): Bars 16–23
In stretto 2 the voices in the pairs are less closely bound, at a stretto interval of two whole notes.
It is time for intensity to mount, thanks first of all to tonal ambiguity—the stretto comes on E major but in the key of C-sharp minor—and then to harmonic and rhythmic tensions inherent in two new countersubjects. (Neither will be heard after this phrase.) One of them features a chromatic progression, the other syncopations and a series of repeated eighth-note turns [bars 16–17, 17–19, 19–20]. Partly because the syncopations continue into the cadence, the fugue’s second cadence in a minor key, F-sharp minor, sounds more profound than the first, in C-sharp minor, not only lower.
Phrase 4 (strettos 3 and 4): Bars 23–35
The voices engage at the shortest stretto interval yet, a half note, and the subject appears in variation.
The fugue is growing more intricate and intense, and to bring matters to a head, Bach throws the whole book at us (gently). The mode switches: the stretto brings the subject four times in the minor mode. The stretto interval tightens. The variation itself is so subtle that Roger Bullivant in his book on fugue admits that he caught on to it only after reading the commentary by Tovey! Tovey haughtily treated such variation procedure as a commonplace in Bach’s work, but in fact the thematic manipulation on this occasion stands out for its originality and suavity.
A little figure consisting of two upward steps in quarter notes, emerging from the varied subject itself (see example 13b), mutters away in various voices throughout the stretto, even before the second voice materializes. As to rhythmic intricacy, not only has the music slipped into continuous quarter-note motion, with the help of the figure just mentioned, but the surfaces are ruffled by a hint of triple meter in the varied subject (example 13b). Each of the previous strettos has led fairly quickly to a strong cadence, and this one seems headed for another, in bar 27.
But this is the point where parallelism among the phrases breaks down. The cadence is interrupted (made “deceptive”), and what interrupts is a new stretto, of the subject in diminution.
Bullivant writes as follows about diminution in fugal writing: “It is not a very common device; while intensifying the movement, it has also the tendency to make the subject disappear into the flow of the counterpoint.” Just the reverse happens here. The counterpoint has already begun to flow more smoothly from the beginning of phrase 4, and this quarter-note flow is now articulated and, as it were, rationalized by the diminution of the subject into quarter notes. The rhythm clears up, and so does the harmony; perhaps the most beautiful moment in this beautiful fugue comes as the diminished stretto in the alto—and stretto has never sounded more natural—pulls away from the minor mode toward B major [bar 27].
We seem to be hearing a new voice, a more intimate speaking voice, volatile and emotional. The eventual response in bars 34–35 is the most profound cadence yet, in the mediant, G-sharp minor. The intermediate cadence in 27–28, the fugue’s first in the dominant key, long awaited, is much slighter—radiant, all the same.
In bar 29, the also radiant ascent to E in the soprano can be heard as an outcome of the upward-step figure—and if it also recalls the original countersubject, that is no accident, as will become clear in a moment. A fifth subject entry in diminution, in the bass, after four in the stretto, is answered in the tenor with another unique thematic manipulation [bars 30–31].
This answer, at the same time interval as before, brings the subject much changed: inverted, with the opening note abbreviated (from a half note to a quarter) and the opening interval expanded, from the putative step G♯–F♯ to the leap C♯↘F♯.
Described in words or referred to a score (example 14a), this analysis may appear forced: inversion, diminution, abbreviation, expansion . . . To the ear, however—to my ear—the transformation is not only convincing but also climactic in a quite wonderful way; it is exactly because of the hyperbolic expansion of the launch that we recognize the figure as an inversion—as an answer—at all. Against the whirl of this subject/answer pair in diminution, and the rich, almost passionate sequence that emerges from it, the subject in its normal time values can slip by almost unnoticed [bars 30–32].
Phrase 5 (stretto 5): Bars 35–43
Bach moves directly from the G-sharp-minor cadence to the tonic key E. Stretto 5 recapitulates stretto 2, with the alto, tenor, and bass entering on the identical pitches at the same time interval, and the soprano at the correct pitch also. With this difference: the soprano waits before sweeping in at a higher octave, like a diva with a catch in her voice; the abbreviation of the subject’s opening note in bar 39 makes a comparable effect to that of bars 30, 31, and 32. With this superb entry the highest voice at last reaches its highest register, which it has not even come close to since the start of the fugue.
Two bars later an extra entry, in the bass again—extra, after the four entries of the stretto—leads to the final cadence [bars 40–43]. Of all the bass entries, this one reaches lowest down and in doing so gives us something we have been wanting badly for a long time without knowing it: as amends for the subject’s boring ending on its opening note, the line continues to sink down through an entire octave, coming to rest on the low tonic. The soprano entry beforehand has done something complementary.
These two final entries, high and low, cap and close a phrase that recapitulates matter more closely than usual even in those Bach fugues that can be said to have recapitulations, or something like them. Back in the tonic key, elements are retrieved and brought together from both phrases 1 and 2—both of which, of course, asserted the tonic. From phrase 2, the first of the strettos returns (up to a point) exactly, and from phrase 1, the original countersubject.
The latter returns right away with new vibrancy in the soprano, at a higher register than ever before, ushered in by the diminished inverted subject: see example 14b. (This combination of subject and countersubject could be the most brilliant of all the fugue’s thematic manipulations; one can also hear it incorporating the upward-step figure as expanded to the rising scale from G♯ to E, in bar 29.) The eighth-note snap E↘B↗E, a vivid yet serene reminder of the now distant past, proliferates in the graceful tumble of bars 38–39 and its sequel. Bach reaffirms the thematic combination in the alto and then in the tenor with the opening notes E and D♯—the “correct” inversion notes, at last—transposed down an octave (see example 14c).
They have to be transposed down because otherwise the left hand cannot reach them, but if the fugue were sung rather than played they would certainly be moved back up—and this fugue has been found to be eminently singable. More than one musician had tried it out on an a capella choir before the Swingle Singers dressed it up with scat syllables and a drum track on a hit record of forty years ago, still in the catalog.
One more unique thing about the Fugue in E Major is worth noting: the vacuity of its subject. Does any other Bach fugue make use of anything so primitive? David Ledbetter in his book on the WTC traces the long history of this stretto-happy six-note configuration in early fugal writing. It is stock matter in the classic ricercars and fantasias of Johann Jakob Froberger, in the Ariadne Musica of J. C. F. Fischer—Bach’s model for a series of fugues in all the keys, though Fischer can only coax his club-footed Theseus through twenty turns of the harmonic labyrinth, not twenty-four—and in the principal music textbook of the time, the Gradus ad Parnassum of Johann Joseph Fux. Even the striking sectionalization of the Fugue in E Major can be seen as Bach’s response, supremely artistic and perhaps slightly ironic, to Fux’s elementary rules for fugal structuring.
He would never have chosen such a subject for the WTC without meaning to show how common clay could be not so much molded, drawn out, and worked up as humanized, inspirited. For it is not so much the technical virtuosity of this work that impresses—the systematic strettos, diminutions, augmentations, inversions, and other thematic manipulations—as its extraordinary grace and serenity. The Prelude in E Major being marvelous in its own way, this prelude and fugue has levitated out of the Well-Tempered Clavier onto Dickinson’s and many other people’s manifest of music to be taken along to the once-proverbial desert island, to the soon-to-be-discovered habitable, and therefore musicable planet in outer space.
Dickinson played it on camp pianos in World Wars I and II and called it “the best safeguard, in abstract sound, of the belief that whatever may happen to the contrary there will always be a sane world to make and keep, and incidentally—observe the cadence—a free England.” Anglophobes can play a different ornament in place of the four-eighth-note Rule Britannia figure in bar 42, or just quarter notes G♯ A (in which case dot the B).
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