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

In style (there is no particular thematic resemblance) it is clearly related to some of the
more delicate, galant fugues in the WTC: those in C sharp, E flat, and B flat from
Book I, and those in C, F minor, F sharp, and B flat from Book II. The development of
what might be called the ‘characteristic’ fugue subject is one of the most important
legacies J. S. Bach received from Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer’s Ariadne musica
(more important, in my view, than occasional thematic borrowings and the idea of key-
progression). Whereas most seventeenth-century fugue subjects could be adequately
described with reference to a small number of basic genres (‘canzona fugue’,
Spielfuge, ‘gigue fugue’, alla breve, fuga pathetica), J. C. F. Fischer showed the
beginnings of a new kind of interest in thematic individuality and variety; hints that
Bach took up and vastly expanded in his WTC. 62 It may have been the individuality of
Bach’s fugal subjects as much as anything that endeared the WTC to musicians writing
in the Viennese Classical style; a style where distinctive thematic profile was
becoming more and more important. His originality of approach in this respect
allowed galant elements into the very heart of his fugal texture, in contrast to (e.g.)
Telemann’s and Graun’s practice of ‘quarantining’ them in subsidiary episodes. 63
Friedemann, however, goes further in this direction than his father. The subject is
rhythmically fragmented, and prominently features a long appoggiatura on the third
beat; it is, in short, a ‘tune’, rather than a fugal subject. One senses it might be happier
with an independent bass against which to define its rhythmic and harmonic structure
(Ex.1.6):
62 Not all of the fugues in the WTC have ‘characteristic’ subjects, of course. But there is sense in which
even the most conventional thematic material (alla breve and dance-metre subjects, for example)
become ‘characteristic’ by association, once thematic individuation reaches a certain level of
saturation. In the same way, genre types such as the figured chorale, prelude and fugue, march, and
Volkslied , become ‘characteristic’ simply through their inclusion in Robert Schumann’s Album für
die Jugend. In both cases their very conventionality, their ‘typicality’, in itself becomes the reason
for their inclusion.
63 As in Ex.0.4 on p.30 above.
65