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

Kirkendale called a ‘fugato’, a fugue cast in a rounded binary shape. 16 Bach’s
occasional use of this principle (WTC I in E minor, II in B flat) had been relatively
subtle, hardly disrupting the flow of the counterpoint and not emphasising the caesurae
with repeats. This was not true of more typical mid-century examples. Many can be
found among Haydn’s baryton trios (pp.215-227). In most examples by Haydn and
others the fairly nondescript counterpoint tends to evaporate toward the end of each
section, to be replaced by equally nondescript homophony; as a genre it is a pleasant
compromise, but little more. And yet the insignificance of most should not blind us to
the truly impressive qualities of the finale of the string quartet in F sharp minor,
op.50/4 (pp.234-5), a powerfully expressive movement, far transcending the other
pieces whose form it happens to share.
It will be seen that the distinction between rounded binary fugues and sonata
movements that contain a large amount of fugal writing is a fine, perhaps arbitrary one.
In the course of this study we have seen fugue play a variety of roles within non-fugal
movements. Most striking (most likely, that is, to attract the attention of the scholar in
this connection) are cases where a fugal exposition serves as one of the primary
thematic groups. In general, movements that begin with a contrapuntal gesture—the
Zauberflöte overture (pp.23-5), for example, or Clementi’s sonata op.34/2 (pp.358-62)
—tend to have a relatively high proportion of imitative writing. Sometimes the same
thematic material appears in both homophonic and polyphonic guises, as in Clementi’s
op.34/2, or the Kyrie from Mozart’s Mass in F, K.192/186f (pp.286-9).
More common than this, however, is when fugue takes a relatively subservient
role, in the context of transitional or developmental passages. One of the basic
dynamics of sonata-writing is the interplay between regular, periodic themes and other
kinds of freely extensible ‘episodic’ material. That fugue, with its avoidance of
16 Fugue and fugato, pp.79-88
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