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

Formally, the fugue is relatively straightforward and conventional, with two
curious exceptions:
bb.1-5 Exposition (A-S-B), with a longish codetta between the second
and third entries (common in W. F. Bach’s fugues)
bb.6-8 Episodic material
b.9 Entry (over a dominant pedal, which resolves obliquely into:)
bb10-18 More episodic material of varying sorts
bb.19-26 Sequential entries on vi, ii, v, and I, leading to a final entry and
cadence.
The exception concerns what I have vaguely referred to as ‘episodic material’.
Most fugues work in a similar manner to that quintessentially Baroque formal
principle, the Fortspinnungs-Unit. 66 In almost any suite, sonata, or concerto
movement of the late Baroque, a head-motive (usually fairly symmetrical in
construction, and with a strong thematic profile) is succeeded by more continuous,
often sequential development, which leads away from the tonic to a cadence in another
key, and so to the next Fortspinnungs-Unit. This sense of the movement ‘getting
under way’ tonally when the Fortspinnung begins has an obvious parallel in much
fugal writing. Subject entries generally stabilize a given tonal area; episodes move
toward the next. That is mostly how this fugue works: tonally static entries occur in
bb.1-5, 9, and 24; tonally mobile episodes occur in bb.8 and 10-18, sequential entries
in bb.19-22 fill both functions. There remain, however, the passages in bb.6-7 and
bb.17-18, which simply oscillate between I and V then repeat themselves with the
66 Wilhelm Fischer invented the term in his 1915 study Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des Wiener
klassischen Stils (Habilitationsschrift, University of Vienna), distinguishing between the
Fortspinnungstypus and the Liedtypus more typical of the Classical style. The sonata movements of
Friedemann and all his brothers show elements of both types.
68