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

elow). For how many voices or parts is the fugue that concludes Brahms’s ‘Handel’
variations? Are these pieces not fugues, then? Such a definition consigns to a not-
quite-fugal limbo large portions of the fugal repertoire. Any comprehensive treatment
of the subject must take into account the variety of different fugal traditions, whilst
acknowledging the tighter discipline to which some adhered. Marpurg, for example,
distinguished between varying degrees of strictness: the fuga obligata of J. S. Bach,
and the fuga libera or soluta of Handel. 14
Marpurg’s ‘fuga liberata’ would soon to be forgotten by most theorists. As the
teaching of fugue departed further and further from ordinary compositional reality, so
too did it become stricter and less flexible; so too did the academic requirements
proliferate. According to André Gédalge (Traité de la fugue, 1901) a proper ‘fugue
d’école’ should include a subject, answer, countersubject(s), counter-exposition,
episode(s), stretto, and pedal point. How many of Bach’s fugues have all of these
elements? ‘Of course Bach was a very great composer;’ Ebenezer Prout recalled his
colleague G. A. Macfarren saying, ‘but these things ought not to be imitated. We
excuse them because of the writer’s genius.’ Prout responded, ‘I am perfectly sure,
professor, that if Bach had sent up his Mass in B minor as an exercise for his degree
you would have ploughed him,’ at which ‘Macfarren only laughed; he did not attempt
to deny it, for he knew it was true.’ 15
The reason for this difference in approach lay in the different circumstances
they were writing for. Gédalge and Macfarren were quite explicitly in the business of
preparing students for exams—crammers, if you will. Within a single movement,
written at a single sitting, their students had to demonstrate their competence in every
fugal technique. Not for them the luxury of being able to pick and choose, like Bach,
14 His Abhandlung von der Fuge begins with an extraordinary (and largely hypothetical) taxonomy of
every imaginable kind of fugue and imitation, many categories of which are for all practical purposes
virtually empty. See A. Mann, The study of fugue (New York: Norton, 1965), pp.143–61 .
15 E. Prout, ‘Fugal structure’, Proceedings of the Musical Association 18 (1891–92), 151.
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