Reflections

This is a tranquil fugue: long, rolling, undulating in waves. It is remarkable that the majority of the content (subject and counter material) moves primarily in step wise motion. There are very few large melodic leaps. The waves are smooth and very gently rounded. Floating, the fugue is quietly meditative, and the focus of meditation is the rise and fall of simple motion, the primary feeling of up and down.

The subject itself is a study in up and down: it slowly rises upward in three gestures, then sinks, hovering and trembling before it rests. As the second voice repeats the subject, the first voice answers with a contrary study: it moves down in multiple gestures before turning to climb back to its origin. Subject and countersubject are waves that seem to mirror each other as inversions.

The episodic material prominently features its own upward gesture, a four-note motive that repeats transposed a step higher each time. This forms a sequence which explores the simple sensation of upward motion both in the step wise motion of each unit and the step wise motion from unit to unit. This double sense of up creates a lovely symmetry with the double sense of down in the repeated notes of countersubject. The lifting quality of the episode is further amplified by an echoing effect with multiple voices in canonic imitation.

As a final touch in this study of up and down, Bach has the subject enter in its inverted form, moving in motion contrary to the original: what was up now becomes down, and down changes to up. This is particularly striking in the two penultimate subject entries. First, the initial subject rises and sinks, immediately followed by the inversion which sinks further and rises back. The effect is deepened by the fact that the two subject entries move downward in vocal range from tenor (subject) to base (inversion). The fugue ends with the original uninverted subject in the soprano.