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

fugues by his father with a more clearly delineated binary structure than this.
Here, any tonic/dominant polarity is undermined by the subdominant bias of
the second half. The most exposed, articulated cadence in the whole piece occurs in
bar 58, onto V of iv. It sounds like the penultimate articulation in a normal fuga
reditta (see above). But in how many fugues does this cadence point toward the
subdominant, and in how many does the fugue resume with free development of a
scrap of countersubject? The tonic is, however, recovered in plenty of time (bb.69-74)
for the final entry, where a trochaic pattern comes to dominate the texture,
concluding the fugue with a gesture that shows the same rhetorical flair of his father
(Ex.1.9). This is one of the most convincing fugues of the set, with a high level of
textural and melodic interest throughout.
The next fugue, in B flat, could also be described as a ‘gigue-fugue’; but in
most other respects it differs strongly from its predecessor. There is none of the
vigorous, unpredictable part-writing, nor the highly individual physiognomy of its
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