For it must at the outset be explained that the Forty-Eight were never intended as model fugues. Learning was to Bach a means to an end. Except for amusement, as in the Musikalische Opfer, he never let it shew itself. To produce living work it needed the touch of his imagination and the guidance of his clear artist’s instinct. In fact, nothing is freer than his management of the several voices of a fugue. “He considered his parts,” it has been finely said, “as persons, who conversed together, like a select company. If there were three, each could sometimes be silent, and listen to the others, till it again had something to the purpose to say. But, if in the midst of the most interesting part of the discourse, some uncalled and importunate note suddenly stepped in, and attempted to say a word, or even a syllable only, Bach looked on this as a great irregularity, and made his pupils comprehend that it was not to be allowed." But “no part, not even a middle part, was allowed to break off, before it had entirely said what it had to say.... This high degree of exactness in the management of every single part is precisely what makes Bach’s harmony a manifold melody.”
What Forkel here says of Bach’s part-writing in general is true in an even fuller sense of the fugues. I quote him because he was not only one of the most learned contrapuntists of his day, but also a man who discerned clearly the limits of counterpoint and the difference between musical learning and musical art. His description of the fugues is concise and plain, and so much to the point that it deserves quotation here:—
"A highly characteristic theme, an uninterrupted principal melody, wholly derived from it, and equally characteristic from the beginning to the end; not mere accompaniment in the other parts, but in each of them an independent melody, according with the others, also from the beginning to the end; freedom, lightness, and fluency, in the progress of the whole, inexhaustible variety of modulation combined with perfect purity; the exclusion of every arbitrary note, not necessarily belonging to the whole; unity and diversity in the style, rhythmus, and measure; and lastly, a life diffused through the whole, so that it sometimes appears to the performer or hearer, as if every single note were animated; these are the properties of Bach’s fugue.... All Bach’s fugues ... are endowed with equally great excellencies, but each in a different manner. Each has its own precisely defined character; and dependent upon that, its own turns in melody and harmony. When we know and can perform one, we really know only one, and can perform but one; whereas we know and can play whole folios full of fugues by other composers of Bach’s time, as soon as we have comprehended, and rendered familiar to our hand, the turns of a single one."[73]
There is no work that realizes better the conception of a perfect fugue than that in C sharp minor in the first part of the Wohltemperirte Clavier. That it is in five voices and contains three subjects, are facts that would by themselves place it among the most vertebrate of the collection. But least of all does the grandeur of the fugue rest upon its complexity. It is the character-drawing of the several voices, and the nobility of them, that make their discourse sublime—three voices entirely contrasted and entirely blended—each time with a new and surprising effect, now of pomp, now of tenderest pathos—one a slow organ-voice, the next delicate and flowing, and the third vehement, striking hammer-blows. The second and then the last gradually die away; the solemnity of the original theme communicates itself again to the whole web of thought, and the end is plaintive and restful.[74]
A story is told which displays in a characteristic way Bach’s instinctive knowledge of the nature of a fugue. When he happened to be in a strange church where a fugue was announced, and one of his two eldest sons stood near him, “he always, as soon as he had heard the introduction to the theme, said before-*hand what the composer ought to introduce, and what possibly might be introduced. If the composer had performed his work well, what he said happened: then he rejoiced, and jogged his son, to make him observe it.” Otherwise, it is added, his modesty made him the most lenient of critics.
The Art of Fugue has already been mentioned as the last and most massive of Bach’s works. It must have been begun in 1749, and so careful was the author of what he wished to be considered as his masterpiece—in the strict sense—that he had it engraved under his own eyes.[75] He did not live to see it published[76]; the carelessness or ignorance of those into whose hands it came allowed it to appear with several extraneous insertions, and its intended regular structure of fifteen fugues and four canons upon a single theme in D minor remained long obscured. Not content with this gigantic fugue—for it is one fugue through all its fifteen sections—Bach resolved to penetrate still further into the labyrinth of harmonic combinations, and to write, so it is said, a fugue in four parts with four subjects, all of them to be reversed in each of the parts. He had not, however, gone much beyond the introduction of the third subject, which contained in the German notation the letters of his own name, when his excessive application was terminated by a painful disorder in the eyes. He had always been near-sighted, and now his vision almost failed. He consulted an English oculist of repute, who was then in Leipzig; but after two operations he became totally blind, and the medical treatment he underwent broke his hitherto hale constitution. For half a year he declined, until he found his rest on the evening of Tuesday, the 28th of July, 1750. Ten days before his death his eyesight for a short space suddenly returned to him. It was a few days after that strange illumination that he called Altnikol, his son-in-law, to him, and bade him write at his dictation the chorale When we are in the depths of need. But death had become a new presence to him. Often had he lingered upon the idea in chorale and cantata; but now he felt himself to have passed beyond the gulf. He bade Altnikol set other words at the head of the music. The words were these: Herewith I come before thy throne.[77]
CHAPTER IX.
The fact of Bach’s death was registered by the Town Council in the following terms: The Cantor at the Thomasschule, or rather the Capelldirector, Bach, is dead. They proceeded to resolve that the school needed a Cantor, and not a Capellmeister, although he must understand music too. Such was the public recognition of Leipzig’s greatest man. His widow was suffered to live on in need, and to die a pauper ten years after her husband. The youngest daughter was at last relieved by a public subscription, in which Beethoven was proud to join; but not by the town. The last infamy of Leipzig was achieved when S. John’s churchyard, in which Bach had been laid to rest, was rooted up and made into a road. His bones were scattered, no man knew or cared where.