V
Most of Bach’s predecessors and many of his contemporaries regarded the fugue as the highest form of instrumental music. It was the form in which they put their most serious endeavor. The harmonic basis of music was generally accepted and skill in weaving a contrapuntal or a polyphonic piece out of a principal motive or theme, and two or three subsidiary ones, was more or less common to all musicians. Yet fugues up to the time of Bach lacked a logical unity of construction. Excellent as the craftsmanship displayed in them might be, the effect was not satisfactory. There seemed, for instance, to be no very clear reason why a fugue should end except that the composer chose to end it. There was no principle of balance governing the work as a whole. It was architecturally out of proportion, or it failed to impress its proportions upon the listener. Bach alone seems to have given the fugue a perfectly balanced form, to have endowed it not only with life but with organization as well.
The secret of this is that at the bottom of his fugues lies a broadly conceived, well-balanced and firmly constructed harmonic plan. It must be granted, besides, that the subjects out of which he builds them have a singular vitality and are full of suggestion. But Bach, with his fertility in highly charged musical ideas and his apparently unlimited power to weave and ravel and weave musical material in endless variety of effects, rarely let his skill or his enthusiasm betray his sense of proportion. There is a compactness in nearly all his fugues which results from the compression of expressive ideas within the well-defined limits of a logical, harmonic plan.
Doubtless, the definiteness of this harmonic plan is more or less concealed from our modern ears by the uninterrupted movement of the voice parts, which was part of the conventional ideal of polyphonic writing. We are used to the pauses or stereotyped repetitions of the more modern style, which throw harmonic goals into prominence whereon the mind may perch and rest for a moment. Such perches are for the most part lacking in the Bach fugues. The subject takes flight and flies without rest until the end. Moreover, the art of playing Bach which brings out more than the regular and mechanical march of the voice-parts is unhappily extremely rare. Evenness of execution, that unhappy bête-noire of the striving student, is exalted far above any really more difficult, subtle variation of touch which may veil the flow of the various independent melodies in order to bring out the beautiful changing harmonies, arising from them like colored mist. But a simple analysis of any fugue will reveal the clear, well-balanced plan underneath it.
Pause for a moment at one or two of those that are better known. Take, for example, the fugue in C-sharp major from the first book of the ‘Well-tempered Clavichord.’ There is the conventional opening section, in which the theme and secondary themes are announced. We have tonic, dominant, and a clear cadence again in the tonic. Then begins the strong pull toward the dominant, so nearly inevitable in most kinds of musical form, and finally the dominant triumphant with the main theme strong and clear, and a solid cadence.
Here, on the basis of harmony, the first broad part ends, and the music goes on to explore and develop through other keys. The harmonies are rich, the counterpoint melodious, the theme whispered as a recollection from the first land of familiar tonic and dominant. Then clearly we are held for a moment to enjoy E-sharp minor before we play back again, with fragments of the theme, to our well-known dominant and tonic. Off again on motives we cannot fail to recognize, as if we were again to wander afield in harmonies. But, no; we sink firmly upon a swelling G-sharp, our dominant again, the best known note of our theme. The captive harmonies rise and fall. Movement they have, but escape is impossible. The return home is inevitable, it is imminent, it is done. Cheerfully our theme traces its old ground. It pauses a moment as if contemplating further flight, but the tonic key is all-powerful and the flight is ended and with it our fugue.
It is all lucid and logical: the first broad section with its twice-told tonic and its accustomed urge to the dominant; the many measures of wandering that yet pause to make harmonies clear; the long struggle against the anchoring G-sharp that pulls ultimately home.
Or take, for example, the more complicated fugue in G minor (Book I). We find, with few exceptions, the same plan. There are four voices to enter, and the exposition of the theme and counter-subjects is consequently longer. But they come in regularly, one after the other, tonic, dominant, tonic, dominant; and then the irresistible sway of the whole fabric to the relative major, made clear by an unusually obvious cadence. There follows the development section and the various episodic modulations, all held intimately together by recurrences of the main theme. The keys are well-defined. Then, instead of a firm anchoring of all this variety on a pedal point, we have a descending, regular sequence which inevitably suggests an objective point to be reached—the return of the music at last to the keys in which it was first made known to us. And now in this final restatement, instead of retracing step by step the opening measures, we hear the entrances of the theme pressed close together, overlapping, a persistent leading F-sharp from which there is but one escape, the final chords settling majestically into G minor.
Both these fugues are built upon a well-balanced and yet varied harmonic groundwork. The art of Bach shows especially in the middle or developing section in the clearness with which he brings out the various harmonic stages through which he leads his music, and in the manner in which, by the unmistakable method of a persistent pedal point or a regular sequence, he brings back the final restatement of his material in a section balancing the opening section.
Other fugues in the same collection, such as those in C-sharp minor and in B-flat minor, are more architectural. But, though the marvellous building up of themes and counter-themes, as in the C-sharp minor fugue, seems to outline a very cathedral of sound, we shall find none the less the same tri-partite harmonic base underneath the work as a whole.
In longer fugues, such as the great one in C minor coupled with a toccata and that in D minor which is associated with the ‘Chromatic Fantasy,’ the balance between the opening and closing sections is somewhat obscured by the long free section in between. But even here a unity is maintained by the skillful repetition of striking passages and the return to the final section is always magnificently prepared.
Bach did not bind himself to rules in writing his fugues. He handled his material with great freedom. Witness many fugues like that in F minor in the second part of the ‘Well-tempered Clavichord,’ in which he often subdued the main theme to a capricious, obvious second theme. Such a treatment of the fugue approaches the dramatic; and this, together with the division, quite clear in so many, into three sections of exposition, development and restatement, cannot but suggest some sort of kinship between the fugue as Bach conceived it and the movement in so-called sonata form which grew to such splendid proportions in the half-century after his death. At any rate, we are compelled to recognize that in spite of the contrapuntal style, inherited from an age in which harmonic sequence was a secondary element in music, the Bach fugues owe their imperishable form to the same principles of harmonic foundation as those upon which the sonata-form of Mozart and Beethoven is known to rest.