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

as part of a given harmonic combination, rather than as a linear entity subject to
continual re-interpretation.
This fact means of course that episodes stand out in correspondingly higher
relief. Sometimes they are plainly homophonic, obviously ‘episodic’, like Ex.0.4.
Sometimes a certain amount of imitative writing is present in the episodes, as in
fugues VII and XVII, but even in this case they tend to stand apart from the
surrounding texture, being thematically identifiable and usually returning several
times. Bullivant argues that ‘the whole concept of an episode is a most unsatisfactory
one,’ 37 and this may well be true enough for much of Bach and his predecessors.
Telemann, however, is quite systematic in the way he alternates the two kinds of
material—an efficient and matter-of-fact way of constructing a fugue, if perhaps a little
uniform. By no means as perfunctory and fundamentally out of sympathy with the
genre as the Fugirende und veraendernde Choraele he published soon afterwards,
these fugues nevertheless show only a little of the ambition and imaginative scope of J.
S. Bach, or indeed of Telemann’s own more progressive music.
There is no reason to doubt that he took the XX Fugen seriously. Their
dedicatee, Benedetto Marcello, was a composer whom Telemann respected greatly on
account of his Estro poetico-armonico: parafrasi sopra li primi [e secondi]
venticinque salmi. We have seen, however, how they already show subtle traces of the
decline which the genre was about to undergo. What was it that thus eroded the
significance of fugue?
37 Bullivant, Fugue, p.93.
34