Reflections

This is a mighty fugue. It is a coincidental pun that its key is D-sharp minor: among the fugues in the minor mode, it is particularly sharp. Dark and intense, it builds as a storm, a long roll of approaching thunder, breaking in definitive fury with its final flash of electric tragedy. The progression and the ultimate realization of its deepest character is built from multiple interrelated facets as usual. A few are worth considering.

The subject alone is powerfully portentous. The three eighth notes that begin on just off the beat sound the tonic note (first degree of the scale) insistently as a somber bell might knell. The subject is a self-contained dirge, struggling up to the fifth (dominant) then, as if in resignation, falling evenly back to the tonic, a helpless victim of its dark gravity. The countersubject emphasizes a rising motion, a growing, escalating, intensifying motion that surrounds the iron bell like a chorus would its tragic greek hero. The inverted subject is but the tone of a companion bell, a slightly different voice declaiming the same sorrowful words. These are powerful forces colluding with the same dark spirit.

During the course of this fugue, Bach temporarily softens the despair with two sojourns in the major mode. But these are foils that sharpen the return to the minor. The longest episode before the conclusion builds a natural tension due to the absence of the subject. When the subject returns, it does so with a vengeance: all counter point is subsumed by the bass voice, the unforgettable brazen bell. Two upper voices echo the subject one last time in parallel, one inverted as if to brand the subject forever in a final polyphonic symmetry.