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

already become the historicising nature of the genre: Classical homophony is out of
place in a fugue in the same way that a digital watch is out of place in a historical
costume drama—it simply doesn’t fit. This ‘dressing-up’ element (‘Me voilà
perruqué’, as Mendelssohn said upon the publication of his op.35 and 37 preludes and
fugues) is an important part of post-Baroque attitudes to fugue. But can we find a
structural rationale to underpin this instinct?
The concerto-like material referred to above may not itself be imitative or
contrapuntal, nor even bear any particular relation to the subject; but it flows and
evolves in much the same non-periodic, non-repeating way as the counterpoint that
surrounds it. It is the periodicity of galant melody that refuses to co-exist with fugue,
cutting across the overlapping, freely evolving contrapuntal lines, systematising and
coordinating them toward larger goals. The simplest reason the Zauberflöte overture is
not a fugue is that it can be better explained in terms of sonata form: in terms, that is,
of large-scale repetition coordinated with long-term tonal goals. One of the defining
characteristics of fugue thus turns out not to be the presence of certain features, but
their absence—it is no wonder theorists have had such difficulty defining the shape of
fugue, if part of its raison d’etre is the lack of just this kind of schematic
organisation. 27
If the Zauberflöte overture begins as a fugue but loses its fugal identity as it
proceeds, Handel’s chorus ‘Blessing, and honour, glory and pow’r’ (Messiah) is an
example of the opposite situation. Its ‘exposition’ is so loose as to scarcely deserve
the name at all. By Bachian standards the voices enter in a recklessly higgledy-
piggledy fashion: tenor and bass in unison in D (b.1), soprano in D (b.5)
unaccompanied until tenor re-enters with the tail-end of the subject in close imitation
27 See pp.102-5 where BWV 540 is discussed in terms of Keats’s concept of ‘negative capability’. I
should emphasise that this indifference to symmetry is a property of the style itself, not just certain
great composers’ transformation of it—of Johann Pachelbel and J. C. F. Fischer and J. G. Walther,
not just Bach and Handel. It is also (in my view—pace the objections cited on p.230-1) a property
of later successful imitations of the style: most of the fugues of Haydn and Mozart, for example.
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