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

this is not a decision made by the theorists analysing it, but something which the composer tells the
listener by the way in which the design unfolds. 20
Peter Williams (1980)
The frequency of the tonic and dominant entries is highly original and leads to an unusual fugue in
which the subject is constantly accompanied by new countersubjects. Spitta’s judgement that the
countersubjects soon peter out and that the subject ‘must always look around for help’ (I p.583) can
be accepted only if the composer is not allowed to be creating a specific type of fugue whose subject
and answer ... sustain the drive by appearing always on the same three notes but in succession or
alternation, in different voices, with different countersubject, in different textures, and spaced at
different intervals of time. ... The parts countering the subject vary from one (b.3) to four (b.123),
not in the normal way of fugal texture but as a conscious attempt to present the subject—which
remains in as few keys as is compatible with a length of nearly 150 bars—in various guises.
* * *
Finally, the fine, idiomatic organ writing of the last twelve bars should not hide what is
perhaps the most imaginative element in the whole fugue, namely the paraphrased final entry or
entries of the closing bars. 21
Note that this is the point at which, according to Walter Emery, Bach had
‘manifestly lost his grip’. These last two accounts are excellent examples of the sort of
work an imaginative analyst can do, transforming an aporia in earlier critical accounts
into a richer, more integrated understanding of the movement. Both Bullivant and
Williams took a good deal of trouble to find a satisfactory analytical account of the
piece—an effort predicated, one presumes, on its secure position in Bach’s oeuvre. 22
In another article (ironically enough, the one discussed below) Williams acknowledged
the weakness of its source, but asserted ‘obviously it is Bach’s work, for who else,
20 Bullivant, Fugue (London: Hutchinson, 1971), pp.149-51.
21 P. Williams: The organ music of J. S. Bach, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980-
1984), vol. I, pp.72-74.
22 When Bullivant finds it ‘infuriating’, its design ‘one of the worst from the standard point of view’; he
is not expressing dissatisfaction with the piece itself but with existing analytical methods.
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