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

Robert Schumann, impressed by Mendelssohn’s op.35 (‘if [Bach] were to arise
from the grave today, he would, I am sure ... rejoice to find at least flowers where he
had planted giant-limbed oak forests’), 28 also published sets of contrapuntal
movements: the six canonic studies op.56, six fugues on B-A-C-H op.60, four fugues
op.72, seven fughettas op.126, along with a number of separate examples in other
works. These pieces are often regarded as being peripheral to Schumann’s
achievement. But the short-breathed tonal movement of his forms and the textural
elaboration of his piano writing could prove to be a more hospitable environment for
fugue than the homophonic, goal-oriented tonality of the Classical style. Ex.6.3 (from
the Novelette in F sharp minor, op.21/8) shows how close his style could approach to a
fugal exposition without a trace of archaism, without for a moment compromising its
passionate intensity and pianistic richness. Not for nothing did he claim to have
learned more of counterpoint from Jean Paul than from his long-suffering teacher
Heinrich Dorn: ‘It is most extraordinary how I write almost everything in canon, and
then only detect the imitation afterwards, and often find inversions, rhythms in
contrary motion, etc.’ 29
The Romantic preoccupation with counterpoint was continued in different
ways by the works of Brahms, Bruckner, Franck, Liszt, Saint Saëns, and Reger—to
name only the most prominent. More unexpectedly, it outlasted the Romanticism that
gave it birth, forming a part of the quest for compositional order in the music of such
different composers as Hindemith, Shostakovich, Bartók, and Stravinsky.
But now, as the musical convictions of twentieth-century modernism follow
those of nineteenth-century Romanticism into history, we must ask ourselves: is the
history of fugue over? Paul Walker points out how ‘the principal compositional trends
since World War II—total serialism, aleatory music and minimalism—have proved
28 The musical world of Robert Schumann, ed. and tr. R. Pleasants (London: Gollancz, 1965), p.124.
29 Quoted in J. Chissell, Schumann (London: Dent, 1967), p.88.
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