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

the devices most suitable for their expressive purpose. Not for them, Marpurg’s
insight that there might be more than one way to write a fugue. Even within J. S.
Bach’s own mature fugal style (one of the strictest) there is a wide range of
possibilities: with or without a counter-subject; with freely evolving counterpoint or
with tight thematic economy; with or without ‘learned’ contrapuntal devices; with a
neutral antico subject or a strongly characterised and individual one; with a seamless
contrapuntal texture throughout, or with distinctive episodes. With all this variety,
then, what is essential? What makes a fugue fugal?
One of the odd things about fugue as a genre is the way in which its defining
features are concentrated so strongly in the opening bars. In this respect fugue is
unique. It is for example impossible to tell for certain whether a movement is in
‘sonata form’ until relatively near the end (until, that is, a recapitulation in the tonic of
material first presented in a foreign key); likewise, to describe a piece as a binary,
rondo, ritornello or variation form is to tell us quite a lot about the shape of the piece
as a whole. But any textbook or introductory guide to fugue will begin by talking
about the subject itself, and then the complex and mysterious business of answer
procedure, tonal and real. A codetta may follow, perhaps, and then one or more
countersubjects (necessarily in double counterpoint); or perhaps the countersubject
entered with the subject, and it is a double fugue. Or did the answer move in the
opposite direction to the subject? In that case we have a fugue by inversion. The
voices enter one by one: bottom to top, top to bottom, or inside voices to outside; on I,
V, I, V (with occasional exceptions in Fux and Bach, but not in Cherubini or Sechter).
Once all the voices are engaged there may also be further ‘redundant’ entries, or
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