This prelude and fugue are as different from the first ones in C major as could be imagined. Starting with the prelude, it begins with a relentless moto perpetuo using an arpeggiated figure, another one of Bach's happy inventions. Did any other composer ever find so many different ways to arpeggiate chords? Here, the arpeggio always includes neighbor tones and wanders around among closely related keys like E flat, B flat and G major. Towards the end there is a surprising change of texture with a coda in three tempi: presto, adagio and allegro which does little more harmonically than sit on the tonic, tonicize the subdominant and cadence on C minor with a tierce de Picardie (major third). Great piece with a unique rhythmic layout. Towards the end it resembles a fantasia.
This fugue is one that has been extremely popular with music educators because it demonstrates so many features of the genre: false entries, hidden entries, sequential episodes and so on. Whereas the first fugue in C major is stretto, stretto and nothing but stretto, this one hasn't a single instance of the stretto. Instead it has developmental episodes and contrapuntal inversions. But what strikes the listener first is the jaunty, dance-like subject.
A false entry is one where we hear just the beginning of the subject, in this case that very distinctive C, B natural, C motif, but it is not followed by the rest and the actual subject, complete, soon after appears in a different voice. An example is found in the second half of m. 10 where that beginning motif, in this case, B flat, A natural, B flat, is found in the alto voice, followed by a couple more notes from the subject, but it does not continue but is instead interrupted by the real subject in the soprano in the next measure on E flat.
The design of the fugue is fairly simple, one reason is it popular with those teaching how to write fugues. There is the subject with its characteristic lower-neighbor ornament and two downward leaps, first a fifth and later a sixth. The subject is accompanied by two countersubjects, the first in mm 3-4 joined by the second in mm 7-8. Bach manages to use nearly all of the possible inversions of these three elements: subject below with CS2 and CS1 above in that order, subject on top with CS2 and CS1 below in that order, subject in the middle with CS1 above and CS2 below and so on.
Like all Bach fugues, the more you listen to it, the more you hear. Take for example the sudden rich harmony of the last two measures leading to the final cadence. Joseph Kerman, in his fine book on Bach fugues, The Art of Fugue, hears a bit of extravagant self-parody here (p. 14). Do you agree?
Here is Víkingur Ólafsson:
2 comments:
I think it may have been George Oldroyd who said there were two easily overlooked lessons to be gained from studying this fugues students too often miss:
1.) it's not necessary, even in a fugue with triple counterpoint, for all voices to be active simultaneously
2.) with reference to the fugues in general the "textbook" approaches are misnomers and every fugue derives from the viable polyphonic possibilities inherent in the nature of the subject and any applicable countersubjects rather than on prescribed use of things like stretto.
An upshot of those observations might have been an ad hoc, implied idea that you're better off cutting off the number of voices you have in your fugal texture where you still have convertible counterpoint than to add just one more voice and end up having voice-leading problems. Did you write double counterpoint? Great. Botched triple? Back to the drawing board. Got the triple counterpoint? Okay, if you botch quadruple that means you could try again or that maybe you should let the fugue subject and countersubjects warn you via the part-writing breaches that you've hit a suitable maximum for polyphonic texture.
I know firsthand the guitar makes these kinds of guidelines even more critical. It really is better to stick with double counterpoint in F# major rather than try to go for a third or fourth voice and then end up having weaker voice-leading for it.
Sound advice from someone who has written a few fugues!
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