Reflections

Once beyond the exposition, the music is a pure game of follow the leader, the imitative quality of fugue heightened by rapid succession, feint, surprise, and the thrilling juxtaposition of stretto. The final quartet of the fugue is all stretto using both the subject and its countersubject in constantly shifting timing relationships. The game is further spiced with tonal surprises using harmonies and modulations for a novel spontaneity. This is lively, witty musical play of the most entertaining sort. It is pure fun.

The stretto in this fugue is marvelous. It is also sleight of hand (ear). In the tenth subject entry just before the stretto starts, there is one measure missing. The stretto is dramatic with a breathtaking ingenuity: all three voices participate running from top to bottom staggered in their entries by a mere single measure. Shostakovich preserves this dovetailing enabling us to hear the head, middle and tail of each and every entry clear as day. He does this by adding delays in each subject. The first entry has a measure delay after the first four notes. It then runs to completion. The second entry has additional delays plus it is missing the same inner measure as the tenth entry. The third entry has all its pieces, but is once again throttled with delays to keep it in sync. The stretto is utterly convincing, but it is an illusion. But there is more. Just as the third entry is finishing its last four notes, a new subject enters, in stretto, in the upper voice. Once again, the other two voices follow (all three voices from top to bottom) with their subject entries in stretto, and once again, they are staggered by only one measure. This time, Shostakovich achieves the illusion by omitting the inner measure (same as before, the fourth measure of the subject with the four note repetition) of all three subject entries without using delays. Marvelous musical engineering.

What's left? Well, after a bit of episode, the fugue tries to stretto one more time. All three voices enter, once again, from upper to lower voice, but this time, with an even tighter stretto. The voice entries are staggered by only one half of a measure. Yikes! Perhaps it is too much. Indeed, the first two subject entries only get a little way through the subject before they break off into familiar counterpoint. The third, lowest entry barely makes it past the first four notes, before noodling a bit, finally making its way to the A (the tonic of the fugue) where it begins the last complete subject entry. Funny, just as the final subject is finishing off, the upper voice comes in with a delayed imitation of the subject's tail. Just a few measures later, the middle voice adds its two cents, singing the subject tail as well, adding one final note to end the fugue on an A. The psychological experience of completion has been cleverly satisfied: it is as if the two upper voices started the subject, were delayed (a prominent structural theme in this fugue), but were eventually permitted to run to completion. In this sense, there are a total of 19 implied subject entries.

Pure fun.