Reflections

The prelude is wonderfully contemporary. It is a partitioned sequence of fun in grand gestures, like American ragtime. One instantly things of James P. Johnson or Zez Confry: a better vehicle was never wrought. Whimsical mirth pervades in an expressionistic cabaret. Dizzy. Ambiguous. Terrifyingly comic. Shostakovich is a wizard of rhythm and texture. From the beginning, the entire piece teeters on a brutally calculated tangent of off-balance. Phrases totter and evaporate. Textures flutter with lightness that blurs them as dreamlets. The parody of daintiness collides with the brash swagger of carny bravado. Everything is so honest but then so undone by the next segment of emphatic appeal. Even the final grand cadences are thumbed at, deflated, framed in farce by flatulently fractured motives. Glaring lights, leering painted faces. What is real? Who knows?! Who cares. It is all nothing less that a brilliant musical circus.

By way of breathtaking contrast, the fugue slashes the mood with a razor blade of keening counterpoint. A true wedge of a subject spreads like a conflagration of mathematical panic and the wacky circus is ignited with unswerving logic. Another rhythmic tour de force sweeps everything out of its wake with contrapuntal conundrums of the highest order. But while riveted to the manic, evil perfection of it all, the silly prelude suddenly leers again, first, with a taunting rhythmic motive and then, in some random later moment, a grand cadence like a pratfall. It is all an illusion, sleight of hand. It matters not. This is an appeal for the meaninglessness of it all constructed with the most meaningful attention to detail, a supremely orderly dissertation on disorder that only the longing for order can understand.

This fugue is really quite complex. The subject, its countersubjects and the episodes are all highly chromatic. With four voices, the texture is dense. There is a great deal of stretto in the second half of the fugue, at it is not simple: the subject runs in stretto with augmentations of the subject, at least two different forms. On top of it all, several of the subject entries (standard and augmented) are entries stated by multiple voices in parallel, some creating thick, colorful chords. One variant of augmentation inserts rests after each quarter note, the other is more traditional: it doubles the value of each note, using half notes rather than quarter notes. How does it all possibly work together? How is it even possible to perform?

As an example of counterpoint in its most elevated form of the fugue, this composition is nothing less than genius.