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

are distinguished clearly from subject entries, with a fine diminution of harmonic
rhythm between bb.15 and 26. Unusually, it is a fuga reditta: a fugue where, after a
strong imperfect cadence near the end (b.26), the voices re-enter one by one in
(illusory) stretto. 67
Its companion in D minor bears more than a passing resemblance to the fugue
in the same key from the second book of the WTC. Both slide down chromatically,
and both present a systematic alternation between even and triplet semiquavers. If the
second fugue was an expanded treatment of the D minor invention’s material, this is a
slimmed down and abbreviated version of its model. Again, it is a fuga reditta, with
the important cadence occurring quite early, in bar 24.
The fifth fugue, in E flat, is the most extremely galant of them all (Ex.1.8).
Not only is the tune laden with prominent appoggiaturas, it actually repeats itself from
bar 2 to 3. This internal repetition (amplified by the sequential repetition in bb.4 and
5) weakens the fugal texture considerably, by revealing that the illusion of independent
part-writing is in fact an illusion. To an extent this is always the case, of course; while
67 Fuga reditta was a term first used by Angelo Berardi in his 1687 Documenti armonici. It simply
means a fugue with a stretto toward the end, but it implies that the stretto is set off by an articulated
cadence. Very common in the Italian and south German traditions, it is almost unknown in J. S.
Bach.
70