Reflections

Music written in a minor key (minor mode) is generally imbued with an emotional quality that is dark rather than light: one can feel sorrow, anger, wistfulness, even anxiety. Most simply put, a minor key feels rather sad. With reference to the moods expressed by the variety of preludes and fugues in the Well-Tempered Clavier, a famous musician once explained (to paraphrase liberally), "Ah yes, sadness. But is it a tender sadness, or a noble sadness, is it hopeless or radiant with wisdom". Even within a single fugue, such as this, Bach can guide our emotional reactions through several shades of dark moods, a conscious progression from quiet sadness, to pathos, to resignation, to a temporary hopeful respite in a major key, to a monumental darkness, cold and definitive. But these moods, these nuances, these emotional narratives are inextricably embedded within the music, the sound, or rather, the human experience of perceiving sound through the sense of hearing. Words are practically speechless in the face of music. As Mendelssohn said, "music is more specific than words". But it is not even a question of more or less: music and words are like apples and oranges. It is fairly impossible to capture the essence of music in an entirely different mode such as language. Though we try, endlessly, out of a need to respond, to participate, to retain. In the end, there is always the music itself to return to. And after slicing and dicing, grasping, taking, struggling, transmuting, the supreme challenge and responsibility is to attempt to hear it again, as though for the first time.

It is, on the other hand, quite possible to make some revealing technical observations.

This fugue is one of only two throughout both books of the Well-Tempered Clavier written in 5 voices (the other is also in book 1 and in a minor key as well: No. 4 in C sharp-minor). With the exact same proportional scarcity in his Op. 87, Shostakovich provided only one fugue in 5 voices: No. 13 in F-sharp major). This is the richest texture available in these sets of fugues.

The diagram for this fugue is fascinating. It is clean, orderly and almost sparse of detail. This fugue is entirely about the subject, lavishly spread across 5 voices and shot through with the thrill of stretto in a myriad of permutations. The subject itself is quite short, which would seem to logically follow from the fact that up to five voices will enter, even in stretto. This holds true for both other five-part fugues listed above. The "head" motive of the subject is a powerful pair of half notes that drop from the rock solid tonic (1st note of the scale) to its point of furthest remove, the dramatic dominant (5th note of the scale). This becomes the most prominent aspect of the entire fugue when it recurs in rapid succession from voice to voice during stretto.

As for the amount of stretto in this fugue, it is essentially omnipresent, grouping this with a number of other fugues commonly called stretto fugues. The stretto begins, rather remarkably, in the exposition between the very first two subject entries. A noticeable codetta separates this pair from the next, two more voices in stretto. The exposition finishes with the final, fifth entry all on its own, ending a perfect descent from high to low as if in some concentric theme of descent initiated by the two-note motive in the subject itself. Every subsequent subject entry but one involves stretto. The climax of this fugue is its grand finish, a tidy re-exposition, again from highest to lowest part, in a dovetail of stretto which accelerates the textural density, compresses the time frame, and perfects the complete realization of imitative counterpoint and so the actuality of this fugue.