Reflections

An alternate metaphor might use water: rain drops on glass, ephemeral, transparent, yielding gracefully to gravity which pulls them downward, drops turning into rivulets, into trails, into curiously lingering streaks as new drops appear, heavy, long singular notes before they too succumb.

Delicate, and highly articulated, the subject comprises many motives, pauses, flourishes and a variety of rhythms. Altschuler would call this a multi-thematic subject in that it has many ideas. Spanning a not so unusual four measures is a series of 55 notes. Taken at an adagio tempo, the subject is indeed one of the longest you will find. You many notice that subsequent subject entries seem to grow longer as they continue beyond the ending of the first entry, several of them consistently adding two additional measures that extend the melodic coherence of the subject. The subject's initial motive is bounded by the first dotted half note and the subsequent half note, both B flats. The motive is unmistakable with its long first note, the gentle motion of the triplets, the faster trill and the return to the starting note. It is essentially but one note, a fluttering departure, and a return to that one note. While the beginning of every subject entry is recognizable for this signature, not every occurrence of this motive is a complete subject entry. There are at least 6 instances of this or a part of this motive without the ensuing subject running to completion.

There are at least two countersubjects in this fugue. Just like the subject, they are long, multi-thematic, sinuous and flickering with the same, exotic, dreamy darkness. The pauses and flourishes of subject and the countersubjects are interleaved so that while one rests (suspended), the others come alive. The active motion and the focus of attention shifts between them, back and forth, over a long period of sustained awareness required to follow each line to completion. At a slow tempo, the effect is amazing: it almost seems that there is no beginning or end to the long lines of song that interweave like a braid, like a quiet but eloquent conversation among ethereal souls, calls and responses from a completely different plane of temporal existence. With its tremendous sense of space and time, the contrapuntal texture in this fugue is loose and transparent, each voice a clear and distinctive etching.

At the ending of the fugue, the late, dark, romantic night softens into the gentle brightness of dawn. The minor turns to major in the end, as many Baroque compositions in a minor key did (e.g. Picardy third), but Shostakovich gives us much more than a final chord or two: a six measure coda with three occurrences of the subject's initial motive in the lowest voice and a delicate winding down of the other two voices.