Reflections

Unique features: stretto during exposition, exposition sounds like 4 voices, seemingly parallel subject entries towards the end.

Bruhn provides a detailed discussion about how unusual the subject of this fugue is. Her summary highlights that this subject doesn't sound much like a subject; by design, it seems to defy any melodic character and its closure (harmonic or rhythmic) is obscure. The pause after the first note feels tenuous. The subject resumes on an off-beat and climbs a most non-melodic series of intervals in steady eighth notes until its momentum is checked by a syncopated quartet note (eighth note tie), which eventually sinks into the subject's highly undramatic close. Its odd features, coupled with a similarly unusual exposition, make for a confusing and down right deceptive opening.

The integrity of the subject is blurred by the sudden entry of the second voice. Is the initial voice finished? Is the subject over? Did the second voice come in too early? The subject has not concluded, but is overlaid by itself as the second voice enters in stretto. It is unusual for voices to stretto in the exposition. The nature of the subject is therefore inconclusive, both intrinsically, and in relation to its reappearance in another voice. As if to add icing to this cake of confusion, Bach has the third voice sing the subject twice consecutively, the second time a 4th lower (in the typical manner of the answer). The impression is an exposition in four voices, not three, as the fugue advertises and ultimately reveals. Episodic material borrows heavily from the subject and at times directly precedes or follows the subject with what appear to be extensions or elongations. Again, as the subject and exposition are "smeared", so is the alternation between subject and episode.

There are three or four places in the fugue where the subject is accompanied by the other voices using material that sounds much like the subject, sometimes inverted. Multiple voices move in lockstep, hopping intervals with steady eighth notes. From one perspective, it sounds like parallelism, where independent lines join by coincidence. From another perspective, the texture temporarily collapses into homophony, a single thickened line full of harmony.

The fugue falls into roughly four sections, with sections two and four adding a 16th note pulse to soften the relentlessness of the 8th note subject. The new pulse, twice as fast, simultaneously adds momentum and relaxes the rhythm. Something which in retrospect appears static and constrained gives over to the fluid. In contrast to the intervalic leaps of the subject, this countersubject moves almost entirely in the natural steps of the scale. While it does not function in the traditional manner of a countersubject, it commands attention with its own integrity, at times appearing briefly like a second subject.