J. S. BACH Jonathan Berkahn - Victoria University - Victoria ...

to expand and elaborate the surface of Mozart’s forms fifty years later. It is all very
well done, with commendable thoroughness and skill, but sometimes one is tempted to
ask just why it was done.
The most extreme case of this rather decadent stylistic exaggeration can be
seen in Krebs’s Prelude and Fugue in D minor. The Prelude alternates free-wheeling
passagework in manuals and pedals with durezza chords and dense but mostly
homophonic material for 144 bars (generally Bachian in style, rather than based upon a
particular model)—and the fugue clocks in at no less than 238 bars! These are not
short alla breve bars, either; there is plenty of quaver and semiquaver activity. This
immense scale of operations raises two interesting question: 1) how is it physically
possible to sustain a fugal argument over this sort of span, and 2) how does J. S. Bach
not only sustain a fugal argument over this sort of span, but make it a compelling
musical experience?
The first question is easy enough, if a little tedious, to answer. After his
exposition (four voices, ASBT), Krebs begins a series of alternating entries and
episodes which takes him to b.53. The entries are mostly on i or v apart from a single
exception (III) in b.28; the episodes are not derived in any obvious way from the
subject or related to each other, but neither do they jar with their surroundings—there
are six in total, mostly straightforwardly sequential. At b.53 a new subject appears,
strangely reminiscent of that in ‘the’ Toccata and Fugue in D minor (BWV 565), but
obviously destined to be a countersubject. First of all, however, it is granted its own
exposition (BTAS). A cadence in A minor is followed rather unexpectedly by an entry
in G minor (b.70), after which there follows the same alternation of tonic or dominant
entries and sequential episodes that characterised the first section. It is not until b.102
that we finally get to hear the two subjects in double harness; the combination is taken
though an exposition of its own, then there follows another series of entries and
100