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

nineteenth-century organ, are atypical—his early fugues end with an elaborate plagal
flourish, late ones with a plain perfect cadence.
Strangest of all is the very last chord; for ‘where else in the music of J. S. Bach
or his contemporaries is there a minor plagal cadence? ...a final major chord is so very
much more likely that one can only wonder at the power familiarity has of blunting our
responses. ... But how can one understand or think anew about a piece for which it
would need a very bold performer indeed to play that most likely f sharp?’ 43
Considered as a fugue, the piece is extraordinarily primitive (not surprisingly,
Prout refers to it only once in his fugal textbooks), deficient in basic fugal
craftsmanship in just about every respect—and yet, somehow, it remains so appallingly
effective. Is it just familiarity that has inured us to its fairly obvious shortcomings?
For all its harmonic monotony (perhaps even because of its harmonic monotony) there
is something strangely compelling about the subject, in the way its recurring inverted
pedal maintains a sense of expectation. In a similar fashion, the manner in which
musical substance is attenuated to the merest filament during such figuration as bb.74-
85 likewise deflects attention forward and away from itself. Any fugue contains
passages of greater or lesser intensity—passages of expectation (episodes, figuration,
slender textures, dominant pedal-points) prepare for moments of arrival (subject
entries, pedal entries, full textures, cadences), and successful mediation between these
is the mark of a good fugue composer. One of the general criticisms that can often be
levelled at writers of fugues after Bach is that their counterpoint, though
unobjectionable in detail, fails to project a convincing sense of shape or direction—
they give an impression of feeling their way forward from chord to chord and entry to
entry, ‘composed piecemeal’, as Humphreys said of BWV 534; ‘the composer never
calculating for more than the immediate needs of the situation’, apparently ‘incapable
43 Ibid., 333.
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