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

Arioso into the rest of the movement he has to find his way back to the tonic A flat
without disrupting the fugal continuity—that is, without appearing to stretch its tonal
conventions unduly. He achieves this through a discreet sleight of hand in bb.145-52.
The crucial shift, prepared by a stray E flat in b.145, is brought about by reinterpreting
G major as the dominant of C minor in b.152. From this key it is an easy step to E flat
(b.168 ‘Meno allegro’), and A flat is confirmed with the bass entry—the subject in its
original form—at b.174. What the first exposition in A flat failed to do, the second
has now achieved.
In itself this is nothing more than a clever expedient, an ingenious solution to
an interesting musical problem; its emotional significance derives entirely from the
pathos of the Arioso and the affect, consoling then celebratory, of the fugue. But this
procedure is the engine which raises this emotional significance to a higher power than
would have been possible with a more conventional tonal scheme. There is something
profoundly redemptive about the way the second fugue works its way back from G,
taking the estranged key of the Arioso into itself and reconciling it with the tonic.
Of another order of magnitude again are the two enormous fugal finales in B
flat: that of the ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata op.106, and the Grosse Fuge, op.133.
Separated by about a decade, they have a lot in common—their immense length, their
gritty, involuted counterpoint, their vast tonal and expressive range, and their complete
disregard of the listener’s comfort or convenience. There are also significant
differences between them, however.
Like that in op.110, the ‘Hammerklavier’ fugue is an exercise in the systematic
integration of distant keys into Beethoven’s fugal style; unlike op.110, this is not
provoked by the presence of a ‘foreign body’ in the movement, but emerges from
within the fugal texture itself. The problem here is how to make the full range of late
Classical/Romantic tonal possibilities available without falling into the tonal disorder
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