Op 87 - No. 11 - B major - Fugue
music || notes || words prelude

Reflections

This is a thrilling fugue! It is racing perpetual motion, ecstatic double-speed counterpoint, at first the seamless texture and momentum of Bach's finest Baroque energy, and then, the artfully spastic play of contemporary Shostakovich. The latter development wields stretto and augmentation simultaneously in a fantastic excitement of complexity, a final subject entry in a final climax before a fractured coda. Bravo! The sheer force and the continuity of coherent counterpoint incline one, when trying to isolate the subject, to keep adding more notes.

The intense and bright momentum of the major mode smoothly transitions into the darker minor, adding a sharpened urgency to the trajectory of the fugue with a flavor that is distinctive to the Russian masters (e.g. Prokoviev or Stravinsky or Rimsky-Korsakov). The darkness clears and the brightness becomes almost funny. The augmented subject entry in the lowest voice at first sounds ragged and sarcastic. As the pattern gels, the smile of humor becomes the more subtle smile of ingenuity.

There is a prominent four-note motive the recurs episodically. It appears in the codetta of the exposition. With each subsequent occurrence, it seems to arrive triumphantly, creating a chain of temporary climaxes. With each subsequent occurrence, it is followed by similarly recurring tail that grows longer each time.

One of the final subject entries is the single occurrence of the subject in augmentation. It starts in the lowest voice in conjunction with a regular subject entry in the highest (the "other" final subject entry). The augmented version is half the speed and twice as long as the original, running fourteen measures. It embraces three standard subject entries during its own duration and is in fact the last complete subject entry to be heard. It certainly feels to be the climax and the apotheosis of the fugue, its subject finally as big and deep as it might possibly be. The remainder of the fugue is essentially a coda that features apparent subject fragments that never complete: they seem to be the final sparks of energy thrown from the immense kinetic energy of this fugue as it cools into its conclusion.