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The Art of the Fugue
Expended version of a review of The Art of Fugue by
Joseph Kerman
for the London Review of Books, 2006
Counterpoint, the art of combining two or more
independent melodic lines, is the prime distinguishing feature of Western
music. Music began with monody - unaccompanied melody - and with rhythmic
patterns beaten out on sticks and drums. The majority of the world's folk music
is monodic. Often percussion underlines the rhythm, and sometimes a drone is
added, an unchanging note in the bass, which keeps the tune in touch with the
earth as it makes its aerial flights: this is a feature of some of the most
sophisticated non-Western musics, for instance Classical Indian. Indonesian
music uses heterophony - different versions of the same melodic line sounding
together. Imitation is occasionally found in other non-Western musics. But
European counterpoint is something else altogether. Counterpoint is a
conversation; it acknowledges the presence and participation of the other. Two independent
voices may be played by the same musician, on a keyboard for instance, but they
are more often given to two players, who must listen to each other. It is
significant that counterpoint grew to maturity in Europe where the concept of
democracy was born.
By no means
all European music is predominantly contrapuntal; much of it is melody with
harmony, and this kind of music has the
widest popular appeal. Even a complex piece such as a Beethoven symphony will
almost always have a main melodic line that you can sing or whistle your way
through. But try whistling a Bach fugue. After the first few bars where the
main subject is announced unaccompanied, the music divides into two parts, then
three, then possibly four, or even five or six. The contrapuntal discourse is
continued throughout the duration of the piece. How can you hear all these
lines at once? Most of us probably don't. The experience of listening to a
fugue is stimulating yet at the same time forbidding. This is the most
intellectual music that has been devised. But it is also capable of expressing
emotion on the highest level, and where intellect and emotion are in perfect
balance, the result can be sublime. To give three supreme examples: the B minor
fugue in Book 1 of Bach's '48', the six-part ricercare from the same composer's
Musical Offering, and the opening
fugue of Beethoven's C sharp minor Quartet, op.131.
In the preface to his new book on Bach's keyboard fugues, Joseph Kerman quotes
Charles Rosen's perceptive comments:
"The 'pure' fugue, the meditative fugue, is basically a
keyboard work for Bach
... Only the performer at the keyboard is in a position to appreciate the
movement of the voices, their blending and their separation, their interaction
and their contrasts. A fugue of Bach can be fully understood only by the one
who plays it, not only heard but felt through the muscles and nerves." [p.xvii]
Rosen is surely right, and in the same way a string
quartet is best understood by a player taking an active part in the
instrumental conversation. Mere listeners, however, should not despair. It is
possible, with practice, to learn to hear contrapuntal music, especially if you
can read music and follow a score. Then you will see as well as hear how, for
instance, in the first fugue of the '48' - one of the 16 fugues that Kerman
analyses in some detail - the first seven notes of the subject are inverted -
turned upside-down - in two overlapping sequences as the second voice comes in
with the subject a fifth higher, as
prescribed by the rules of fugue. This little piece of clever
craftsmanship - one of many in the
course of this fugue - is, on rehearing and in contemplation, much more than
that; it becomes a mystery - the uncanny power of counterpoint to suggest the
unfathomable.
Fugue developed out of canon or round, music making strict use of the device of
imitation, and exhilarating to perform, as anyone who has sung 'Frčre Jacques'
or 'London's Burning' will know. Canon is a ubiquitous compositional resource:
it can even be found in rock music - for instance the Beatles' 'She Said Se
Said', and the fade-out endings of a number of Beach Boys' songs. Fugue is a
freer form than canon, but there is a general scheme that most fugues adhere
to. First, an exposition: the voices enter with the subject one by one, in a
four-voice fugue in soprano, alto, tenor and bass registers (in any order). As
the second voice enters the first voice continues with an accompanying
'countersubject', which must fit the subject whether it is played below it, or
above. Additional countersubjects may be invented for further entries of the
subject. Devising memorable countersubjects is a test of compositional prowess,
one at which Bach especially excelled. A development follows where both themes
appear in new keys (if it is a tonal fugue) and combinations. Then a return to
the home key; finally a 'stretto' where the subject entries overlap, typically
over a sustained note in the bass emphasizing the main tonality.
Kerman's
book, which usefully includes a CD containing scores of all the fugues
discussed and recordings of some of these played on piano, harpsichord,
clavichord and organ by Davitt Moroney and Karen Rosenak, concentrates on
analytical detail and does not attempt to put Bach in the wider context of
fugal writing throughout musical history. He assumes a fair amount of prior
knowledge, including understanding the vocabulary of harmony; but musically
literate readers will find their appreciation of these fugues greatly enhanced
by the insights that Kerman brings from a lifetime's study as he examines the
music with scrupulous care, bar by bar. His prose is technical but never dry.
Reading his commentary on the B major fugue from Book II of the '48', for
instance, made me think anew about the way the subject rises, falls, and rises
again to a higher note, and how this contour is mirrored in the progress of the
fugue, so that the highest note reached, a B, which occurs three times but only
on its third appearance is entrusted to the subject, feels there like the
climax of great aspiration. It descends from this high point:
"With the
greatest dignity and calm. With no harmonic undercutting and no tumble of
faster notes ... The soprano
response feels like a slow, deep bow ... touched with something like regret,
though feelings are blurred by another suspended note ... Even as
the fugue quietly gives up aspirations for the heights, it
moots confident new possibilities,
even now, for breadth."
Eloquently precise. Music like this attains such
expressive perfection that I for one am reduced to bathos in attempting to
describe my reactions to it. Kerman is undaunted. He concludes his book by
asking himself what he has tried to do, questioning the very practice of writing
about music, and gently justifying it: 'Talk mediates, differentiates,
elucidates, and consoles; we use words, however imprecisely, to talk about love
and death because talk, it seems, we must. We also use and surely must use
words to talk about music.' [p.147]
The art of
fugue had only been practised for a hundred years or so when Bach brought it to
perfection, an achievement insufficiently appreciated by his contemporaries,
some of whom thought the whole thing out of date. The new classical style which
swept through Europe in the mid-18th century, and whose first practitioners
included Bach's sons, was one centered more on accompanied melody than
polyphony. But fugue did not die out with Bach; there was soon to be a revival
of interest, and in fact there has been virtually no major composer since Bach
who has not written at least one notable example of a fugue. There are
exceptions: Chopin's forms admitted Bachian counterpoint, but not the fugue,
which must have seemed alien to his Romantic, poetic sensibility. (It had not
appeared so to his more Classically-oriented contemporaries Mendelssohn and
Schumann; Schumann's sparkling fugal conclusion to his Piano Quintet, for
instance, comes as a delightful bonne bouche.)
Chopin was the most modern, least antiquarian of all the early
Romantics: adapting the sonata was the furthest he was prepared to go in
accommodating himself to the recent past; otherwise he transformed contemporary
dance idioms (such as the mazurka) or invented new forms (such as the Ballade),
in which the fantastic flowers of his melodies could find space to open and
bloom. Wagner, in some ways the inheritor of Chopin's erotically-charged
Romanticism, learned the art of fugue from Theodor Weinlig, a successor to Bach
as Cantor of St Thomas's, Leipzig, and there is a fugue in the finale of the
symphony he wrote when he was twenty. His mastery of Bachian counterpoint in
Die Meistersinger is flawless, above all
in the wonderful fugato ensemble at the end of Act Two; but, as with Chopin,
there was no place for a full-blown fugue in his mature music. Nor in Sibelius,
who nonetheless showed sufficient mastery of counterpoint - and in particular
the Palestrinean counterpoint of the openings of his Sixth and Seventh
Symphonies - to demonstrate that he too
could have written an interestingly individual fugue had he chosen to do so.
Even Debussy, who was primarily a harmonist, might at least have begun to think
about fugue if he had lived to experience the neo-classical revival of the
1920s and been able to pursue the more linear style he was developing in his
last chamber sonatas.
The revival
of the fugue after Bach gets properly under way with Haydn's finale fugues in
the last two of his op.20 string quartets. Haydn may not have known Bach's fugues,
but both Mozart and Beethoven revered Bach - and Handel - and both made
transcriptions of fugues from the '48'. Mozart transcribed three for string
trio to which he added preludes of his own; Beethoven made a string quartet
version of the C sharp minor fugue from Book 1, whose influence can be heard in
his own great C sharp minor fugue in the op.131 Quartet. Mozart's own fugues
sometimes seem to want to outdo Bach in sheer cleverness, as in the Adagio and
Fugue, K546, where the tense fugue subject drives relentlessly through the
music, as insistently memorable in inversion as it is the right way up. In the
finale of the 'Jupiter' Symphony, Mozart dazzles the listener as he
nonchalantly shows off every contrapuntal trick in the book. Here is the spirit
of Apollo: pure delight in the form. With Beethoven, for whom the fugue became
more and more important as he ventured into new areas of artistic aspiration at
the end of his life, Apollo is joined by Dionysus in the duality that Nietzsche
thought essential to the highest art. Dionysus prevails in the most
extraordinary fugue of all, the 'Grosse Fuge' that Beethoven originally
conceived as the finale of the B flat Quartet, op.130, but later detached to
form a self-sufficient piece. As the opening Allegro charges along with
manic exuberance, there is a feeling of exploring completely uncharted
territory, like pioneers in the Australian outback. Huge vistas are glimpsed
but are tantalizingly out of reach. The pace is relentless, the dynamics always
forte. Then suddenly it stops, and a new fugue begins, slow and full of intense
lyrical emotion. And then a third: a rough-edged, unbuttoned dance which
sometimes loses all sense of key. So Beethoven has contrived to encompass all
the elements of the symphony within the texture of the fugue. This music will
always sound 'modern' because it is stretching the limits of the possible; it
is still fiendishly difficult to play. No fugue since has ever been quite so
adventurous on every level.
Many Romantic composers would have been wise to heed Schumann's warning: 'The
emptiest head thinks it can hide its weakness behind a fugue; but a true fugue
is the affair of a great master.' Liszt's fugues, for instance, tend to show up
his deficiencies as a contrapuntist. His chromatic harmony sounds laboured, and
he quickly runs out of steam. The whole philosophy of Romanticism, after all,
was opposed to that of the baroque: the individual, revolutionary voice, whose
natural expression was heightened melody, in contrast with the voice of the
community still grounded in political stability and religion, and symbolised by
polyphony. The majority of later 19th-century fugues are choral, and are
descended from Handel rather than Bach, a routine part of the ubiquitous
oratorio which was the pious Victorian counterpart to Wagner's unleashing of
erotic feeling in his operas. Most of them are dutifully dull, but the best
composers, such as Brahms in the German
Requiem, or Elgar in The Dream of
Gerontius, overcame pedantry with intellectual passion. The choral fugue
that opens Berlioz's Grande Messe des
Morts is compellingly unorthodox, the subject making a dramatic downward
swoop on the words 'Requiem aeternam' while the countersubject sets the same
words to a tremulous descending chromatic scale; at one point each entry of the
subject surges in a tone higher than its predecessor, producing great
cumulative power. Berlioz too found a fresh and colourful use for fugato to
portray the brawling Montagues and Capulets at the start of his
Roméo et Juliette. Mahler, as a student
at the Vienna Conservatoire, neglected his counterpoint studies and failed his
examination, and this seems to have spurred him on later to become an ardent
student of Bach and eventually the most accomplished contrapuntist of all the
Romantics. The influence of Bach may be heard as early as the Second Symphony,
and is all-pervasive in the finale of the Fifth. It reaches its climax in the
central double fugue in the first movement of the Eighth Symphony, where Mahler
also almost matches the striving intensity of Beethoven's
Missa Solemnis.
The 19th-century vocal fugue reaches its apogee in the fugal finale of Verdi's
Falstaff, the last operatic music he wrote. Verdi had already composed a
remarkable and innovative fugue. 'a light hearted Grosse Fuge', as Julian
Budden has described it, in his E minor String Quartet, his only mature piece
of chamber music. In introducing the fugue to the operatic ensemble, he was
bringing to fruition what Mozart had hinted at in the final ensemble of
Don Giovanni. At the end of
Falstaff all the characters assemble on
stage to pronounce their verdict on life: 'Tutto nel mondo č burla'. It is a
compositional triumph: a last summoning up of all Verdi's powers in an effusion
of contrapuntal jest.
In the 20th
century the instrumental fugue made an impressive return. At the start of the
century we find Bartók modelling the fugal first movement of his First String
Quartet on Beethoven's op.131, and Schoenberg in his own First Quartet also
taking up the challenge of Beethoven's late quartets - the first two composers
to do so since Schubert and Mendelssohn made their tentative response; even
Brahms had been daunted. Bartók went on to incorporate a fugue into the Allegro
movement of his Third Quartet in a very Beethovenian way, and to write a
measured fugue of masterful order and precision as the opening movement of his
Music for Strings,
Percussion and Celesta. The neo-classical movement after the First
World War brought the fugue back into fashion. Busoni, who had already found
his own way to an independent kind of neo-classicism, had in 1910 completed
Bach's unfinished fugue from The Art of Fugue in his
Fantasia Contrappuntistica, with
masterly daring. Ives, another independent, working in isolation in New
England, delighted in contrasting the wildest musical experiments with the
orthodox harmony and counterpoint he had learned as a student at Yale. In his
Fourth Symphony, he follows the polytonal second movement, probably the most
revolutionary music he ever wrote, with a fugue based on the hymn 'From
Greenland's Icy Mountains', whose orderly calm is only momentarily threatened
by dissonance. Stravinsky, not a natural contrapuntist, absorbed himself in
Bachian counterpoint in his neo-classical period and wrote an affecting,
chromatic fugue in his Symphony of Psalms.
Later in the 1930s he made an assiduous study of Beethoven's late fugues which
bore fruit in the fugal finale of his Concerto for Two Pianos. Tippett, after
studying at the Royal College of Music, decided to study Bachian fugue
privately a few years later with R.O.Morris, an outstanding teacher of
counterpoint. Tippett took the composition of fugue very seriously and it
accorded with his belief at the time that a composer should go back to Beethoven
to heal some of the wounds that modernism had inflicted. Several fine examples
in Tippett's string quartets show evidence of Beethovenian labours. His friend
and rival Britten had studied 16th-century counterpoint at the Royal College
with John Ireland: it was one of the few disciplines he had not learned already
from Frank Bridge. In his young maturity, Britten threw off several brilliant
fugues with apparent ease; in particular the concluding fugue of the
Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra is
an example of the kind of carefree cleverness for which, absurdly, he was
criticised at the time. Hindemith's many fugues tend towards earnest
academicism, in contrast to Shostakovich's fresh and expressive set of 24
Preludes and Fugues in all the keys, composed in 1950-1, a deliberate homage to
Bach's '48' and a impeccable answer to the avant-garde of the time who were
pronouncing that such things were no longer possible.
The nearest
the fugue came to a modernist gesture was probably Ernst Toch's 1930
Fuga aus der Geographie. This is a
four-part spoken fugue, whose rhythms follow the natural rhythms of the
carefully-chosen words. The subject, given to the tenors and needing Savoy
Opera dexterity to deliver, is:
- Ratibor! und der Fluss Mississippi und der Stadt Honolulu und der See Titicaca
- der Popocatopetl liegt nicht in Canada sondern in Mexico Mexico Mexico
... at which point the second voice comes in, and the
standard fugal procedures are worked through. Toch's fugue has a distant cousin
in the 'Sirens' chapter of Ulysses,
where Joyce - who might have wished to be a composer rather than a novelist,
had he been able - attempts to use some of the techniques of fugue in a
striking display of sonorous prose. He sets out his thematic material in an
introduction - 'Bronze by gold', etc. - and then develops it into rounded,
musical sentences: 'Shrill, with deep laughter, after, gold after bronze, they
urged each each to peal after peal, ringing in changes, bronzegold, goldbronze,
shrilldeep, to laughter after laughter.' There is an illusion of counterpoint
in the juxtaposition of overheard conversation, snatches of songs, and
onomatopoeic sounds. At the same period, musical modernism could initially
accommodate the fugue (in Berg's Wozzeck
for instance). Schoenberg wrote (in 1936): 'In its highest form . . . nothing
would claim a place in a fugue unless it were derived, at least indirectly,
from the theme', hinting at a connection with his 12-note method of
composition; and indeed, 12-note fugues are quite feasible, though Schoenberg
himself avoided them. It may be argued, however, that in denying the tonal
basis on which the fugue had always relied, a great deal of its strength is
lost. In turning against Schoenberg and the continuing emphasis on melody in his
interpretation of the method, the post-war European avant-garde also renounced
all traditional devices of counterpoint, rules of harmony, and regular rhythm,
deeming them obsolete in their quest for a new-found language. Instead, Boulez
and Stockhausen pursued the ideal of the sonic 'moment' in a floating world
free from measured time. This most extreme phase of post-war modernism has long
since passed, and the majority of composers nowadays are trying, in various
ways, to reinstate what was temporarily discarded. Few composers today,
however, are writing fugues, and it has to be asked if fugue can still make a
valid contribution to contemporary musical language.
My own
answer would be yes, and I can point to several examples of contemporary fugue
that, in my view, demonstrate its continuing vitality. Their composers will
probably not become household names, but then I would hardly expect the art of
fugue ever to be modish and popular when the art of serious contemporary music
itself has become an unfashionable minority interest. Before I'm tempted to
lament any further the reluctance of many to engage with the difficult and the
complex in music today, despite its undiminished intrinsic power to move the
emotions, I had better name my fuguists: first, the Scottish composer Alistair
Hinton, who in the huge finale of his nearly three-hour String Quintet
(1969-77), included a 20-minute fugue, or rather three continuous fugues,
modelled on the Grosse Fuge and
rivalling it in its scope and emotional intensity, if not quite achieving its
transcendental vision. Hinton's first fugue, in similar dotted rhythms, has the
fierce energy of Beethoven's opening fugue; his second fugue, in total contrast
calm and sweet-toned and sounding like a piece from the Renaissance, begins and
ends with a canon whose theme becomes a fugue subject in its central section;
the third employs subjects and countersubjects from the first two fugues
together with new themes of its own, and combines all together in the most
learned (yet never pedantic) style, with the themes played backwards and in
inversion, all the time gradually generating another volcanic eruption of
Beethovenian energy. In the spirit of his friend Kaikhosru Sorabji, who wrote
many gargantuan fugues in his still hardly known keyboard works, Hinton has
continued to include large-scale fugues in his own pieces, including the
Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Grieg
and Sequentia Claviensis, both for
piano.
My second
fugue composer is the Moravian, Pavel Novák, who has been working for the past
17 years on another vast project, a set of 24 Preludes and Fugues for piano
based on the Old and New Testaments (twelve for each part). The second set is
still to be completed; the first has so far only had one complete performance,
by William Howard, for whom the work is being written. Novák has a radically
unorthodox attitude to fugue: the first fugue, evoking the creation of heaven
and earth, has only one voice, and no counterpoint; the sixth fugue is built on
a one-note theme and employs only seven notes altogether. The music grows into
greater complexity as the world grows with it. A fugue without counterpoint
might seem a contradiction in terms, but Novák somehow contrives to give
substance to his omissions. The background to his music is rich and
firmly-rooted enough to enable him at times merely to sketch in the foreground.
It is impossible to know yet what the cumulative effect of the whole work will
be, but what he has composed so far constitutes one of the most impressive
piano works of recent times.
Shostakovich's fugues had brought a new sense of spacious calm into the
fugue: they are fugues for the unchanging landscape of Russia. The immense
canon that opens Górecki's Third Symphony (if anyone has paid enough attention
to this carelessly heard piece to notice that it is a canon), beginning in the
double basses, growing to encompass the whole string section, and again
receding, has the same sense of space and of gradual, unhurried movement, like
a slow journey across some featureless plain. Canon is well suited to Górecki's
pared-down musical language; fugue perhaps would be too active for him. In
Howard Skempton's recent and remarkably beautiful string quartet,
Tendrils, the texture is one of
continuous canon. While the mood is one of sustained contemplation, there is
much more contrast than in Górecki. Skempton's Shostakovich-like chromaticism
keeps the music in a continuous state of mild tension, which the abrupt
resolution into E flat at the end does not altogether dispel. Skempton may now
be ready to write a contemplative fugue; he certainly doesn't think it
impossible.
At this
point I should declare an interest. I had used canonic devices in my own music
for many years, but it was not until 1998 that I felt able to introduce a
fugue, a contemplative one somewhat indebted to Beethoven, into my Eighth
String Quartet. It seemed to work. The following year, at a concert in London,
I heard my violinist friend Peter Sheppard Skćrved play Bach's G minor solo
Sonata, which contains an elaborate three-part fugue. I wondered if it was
possible to write a four-part fugue for solo violin, something that as far as I
knew no-one had attempted, for the obvious reason that four-part counterpoint
on a violin is virtually impossible. I wrote a few bars and sent them to Peter,
who to my surprise pronounced them playable. So I finished the piece, in a
neo-Bachian E minor, and thought of it as a one-off technical exercise until
Peter persuaded me to write more. I wrote another four-part fugue, in A minor
but highly chromatic and almost atonal; then, over period of nine months,
carried on writing them occasionally until I had 15, cast in the more practical
keys. Only five of them are four-part fugues, and even in these there is little
continuous four-part writing, which would be almost intolerable for the
listener, let alone the player. There are two two-part fugues and the rest are
in three parts. I amused myself with the kinds of games that fugal writing
seems to encourage: my first two-part fugue has a ten-note theme derived from
the keys of all the fugues in my series in the order they appear (major and
minor counted as one) and it modulates in turn through all these keys before
returning to its home C minor. One fugue was entirely pizzicato. Another was
based on a blackbird's song. I was learning a new skill, like a painter
learning how to etch. Because I hadn't been to a music college, I had never
learned the art of fugue formally. Perhaps those who have to go through what at
the time may seem merely an academic chore cannot associate it afterwards with
living music. I'm grateful to have discovered the sheer pleasure of fugue by
myself, without any prejudices.
Even if counterpoint is presently
neglected, it will not die out: it is too rich a resource. In his exemplary little
book, Counterpoint, Edmund Rubbra, no
mean practitioner himself of the art of fugue, wrote: 'The history of Western
music is the history of the form-compelling power of counterpoint.' That is
justification enough for its survival. Throughout Western music's history,
composers who have possessed what Rubbra defined as 'an intuitive grasp of the
essential spirit of fugue' have been able to renew this most intriguing and
demanding of all contrapuntal forms, and there seems no valid reason why, if
composers can learn to master it, the art of fugue should not continue to
evolve in the future; in Rubbra's words, 'an evolution that never destroys the
basic nature of the form'.
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