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

Cherubini specified a strict order of modulation thus: I, V, vi, IV, ii, iii, V, I (in a
major key); or i, III, v, VI, iv, i (in the minor). 20 This may have been a godsend to the
anxious student wondering where to go next, but as Prout points out: ‘There is not one
single fugue, either in the “Forty-Eight” or (what is still more to the point) in the “Art
of Fugue” in which the order of modulation prescribed by Cherubini is adhered to.’
One can understand, then, the relief with which he seized upon the ‘discovery’ (at first
attributed by him to Hugo Riemann, then to Adolf Marx) that fugue was essentially a
ternary form, explaining the three sections thus: ‘The first contains the exposition, in
the keys of tonic and dominant [and counter-exposition, if present] .... The middle
section includes all that part of the fugue which contains modulating episodes, and
entries in other keys than tonic and dominant; and the final section is that in which a
return is made to the original keys of the exposition.’ 21 If Cherubini’s model was too
prescriptive, however, Prout’s was so loose as to be virtually beyond falsification.
Even he admitted ‘how very elastic’ his conception of fugal form was, and as we see
him apply it to a very diverse collection of Bach’s fugues, we have to ask just how
much explanatory force such a fluid conception retains. 22
The fact is, as Roger Bullivant has demonstrated at some length, key (whether
the key of successive entries or the key of the texture as a whole) is not a consistently
useful way to delineate fugal structure. 23 This partly because in many fugues (nearly
all fugues written before the eighteenth century, for example) the subject only appears
20 L. Cherubini and F. Halévy, Cours de contrepoint et de fugue (Paris, 1835), tr. J. A. Hamilton 2
vols. (London: Cocks, 1837) vol. I, p.70. To be fair, it should be noted that Cherubini was not
specific about the order of v, VI, and iv within a minor key.
21 ‘Fugal structure’, 147. In a letter to the Musical Times, Walter Carroll ascribed priority to Henry
Hiles’s 1879 Grammar of music (‘Fugue form’, The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular
33/593 (1892), 431), but there are adumbrations of the idea in much earlier literature. Antonio
Bertali’s Sequuntur regulae compositionis (Vienna, c.1649-1669) proposed a broadly similar
arrangement of entries first in the tonic, then in other keys, then back in the tonic again, and Johann
Joseph Fux’s Gradus ad Parnassum (1725) recommended a structure of three groups of entries to its
students—but this last was probably intended more as a model for novice students than an analytical
description of actual practice.
22 ‘Fugal structure’, 147.
23 Fugue (London: Hutchinson, 1971), pp.109-74 and many other passages. Of course, as he points
out, to say ‘fugue is not a form’ is not at all the same thing as saying ‘fugues do not have forms’
(p.29).
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