"Sheep May Safely Graze"

Homer Watson, 1855-1936
Pine Woods Near Doon
oil on board
6.5 x 9.25 in


J. S. Bach
Aria: Schafe können sicher weiden (Sheep may safely graze)
From: Cantata BWV 208: Was mir behagt, ist nur die muntre Jagd (The lively hunt is all my heart's desire
Composed: 1713

Soprano Gillian Fisher
With the King's Consort
Conducted By Robert King
Recorded 1987

Bach Flute Sonata in E minor BWV 1034
I. Adagio ma non tanto
II. Allegro
Flute: Emmanuel Pahud
Harpsichord: Trevor Pinnock
Cello: Jonathan Manson
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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"Sheep May Safely Graze"

Aria Four of Bach's Hunting Cantata: Sheep May Safely Graze.


San Francisco Early Music Ensemble Voices of Music
Sheep May Safely Graze, by J.S. Bach
Soprano: Susanne Ryden
Recorders: Hanneke van Proosdij and Louise Carslake
Viola da Gamba: William Skeen
Baroque chamber organ: Rodney Gehrke

The secular cantata Was mir behagt, ist nur die muntre Jagd! (‘The lively hunt is all my heart’s desire’, known as the ‘Hunt’ Cantata)...makes use of four solo singers, including two sopranos representing Diana and Pales. The instruments involved include two corni da caccia, recorders, two oboes and an oboe da caccia, basson, strings and continuo. Diana, in an opening recitative, sings of the pleasures of the hunt, continuing, in an aria appropriately accompanied by the two corni da caccia (hunting-horns), to declare hunting the pleasure of the gods. Later in the cantata, Pales, the goddess of sheep and flocks, follows suit. Her recitative leads to one of the most famous of all arias, widely known in English as ‘Sheep may safely graze’ (‘Schafe können sicher weiden’), words that, in context, have no religious connotation. [Source]

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Sheep may safely graze
Sheep can safely graze,
Where a good shepherd watches over them.
Where rulers are ruling well,
We may feel peace and rest
And what makes countries happy.

German:
Schafe können sicher weiden
Schafe können sicher weiden,
Wo ein guter Hirte wacht!
Wo Regenten wohl regieren,
Kann man Ruh und Friede spüren
Und was Länder glücklich macht!
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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Get a Kick out of Fugue II: Fugue in the Twentieth Century

Thomas F. Bertonneau's I Get a Kick out of the Fugue I:
Mêlée and Free Play in the Most Abstract of Western Musical Forms is here.
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I Get a Kick out of Fugue II:
Fugue in the Twentieth Century
By: Thomas F. Bertonneau

In the first part of this essay, we traced the origin of the musical form known as fugue to the period of the religious wars in Europe, advancing the anthropological explanation of fugue as being representative in a purely abstract way of the patterns of social breakdown characteristic of the time and place. Fugue in its classical form, as perfected by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 – 1759), has prototypes in the Late-Renaissance caccia and ricercar, but it comes into prominence, as a musical form of forms, only in the decades of the sectarian conflicts that followed in the wake of the Reformation. Fugue, we recall, is a musical procedure in which successive voices imitate an initial voice, the theme assuming the role of an object of contention among the voices, subjected by them to development through breaking it down into its constituent motifs, and at last resolving the strife by its resumptive unison restatement, typically as a chorale. The great exemplar is the second half of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D-Minor, the whole of which was made famous, in Leopold Stokowski’s orchestral arrangement, by its inclusion in Walt Disney’s animated feature Fantasia, just before World War II. Incidentally, in a work such as Bach’s “D-Minor,” there is no real reason to separate the initial toccata or prelude – or whatever it might be called – from the fugue proper. The introductory matter serves to expose the basic material out of which the fugue (as it were) will compose itself.

Previously we traced the itinerary of fugue from the Seventeenth to the Late Nineteenth Century, ending with Franz Liszt’s homage to Bach, his Prelude and Fugue on B.A.C.H. (1855; revised 1870). Liszt’s score, in versions for piano or organ, would seem to be something of a non plus ultra in the development of the fugal art, but this is not, in fact, so. Fugue has a rich history in the period from Liszt’s death (1886) through the middle of the Twentieth Century. In this second part of our two-part essay, we will explore fugue’s new lease on life from the Victorian Era to 1950.

It would be rigorously logical to move from Liszt to his most prominent successors in the Austro-German tradition, Gustav Mahler (1860 – 1911), Richard Strauss (1864 – 1949), and Max Reger (1873 – 1916), and beyond them to a host of Central European composers who became prominent between World Wars I and II. On the other hand, the Belgian-born composer César Franck (1822 – 1890) can lay claim to the title of Liszt’s immediate successor, as well as any Austrian or German. Two Parisian composers can furthermore lay claim to being in a direct line of tuition from Bach – Charles-Marie Widor (1844 – 1937) and Louis Vierne (1870 – 1937). Franck, Widor, and Vierne all trained as organists; all three enjoyed careers as concertizing virtuosos, and all three held tenure as titulaires or church organists in Paris. Widor succeeded Franck as professor of organ at the Paris Conservatory. Franck, Widor, and Vierne all composed in a musical language deriving partly from Liszt and partly from Richard Wagner, while reviving aspects of baroque musical practice. We shall come then in due course to Mahler, Strauss, Reger, and beyond, but we shall begin with Franck, passing from him to Widor and Vierne, and from them to Vincent d’Indy (1851 – 1931), Marcel Dupré (1886 – 1971), and Charles Koechlin (1867 – 1950).

Fugue consolidates itself as a musical convention in Protestant Northern Europe in a hundred-year period straddling the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Liszt, who became heir to Bach musically, was religiously a self-conscious Catholic, who late in life took lay orders. Franck, Widor, and Vierne were also Catholic. Franck surprisingly wrote only a handful of significant works for organ, but these succeeded in being at once so innovative and so rooted in antique procedure that they sufficed even in their small number to alter the direction of organ-composition and to establish a new French school; each one of them makes some use, in greater or elsser degree, of the fugal principle, as does the piano composition that marks the high-point of his labors for that instrument. Franck wrote the Prélude, Fugue, et Variation, one of the Six Pieces for Organ (Op. 16 – 21), in 1868. Placed between the “prelude” (in two parts – the prelude as such and the chorale) and the “variation” (in the singular – Franck might have entitled it ricercar or fantasy), the fugue is highly chromatic, being based on the chorale, which itself is tonally ambiguous, sometimes gravitating to B-Minor and sometimes to F-Sharp Minor. The three (or perhaps four) movements pass into one another seamlessly, so that, for example, it is difficult to tell where the fugue ends and the “variation” begins. The “variation” is moreover quasi-fugal in its technique.

Franck followed up the Prélude, Chorale, et Variation with the structurally closely related Prélude, Chorale, et Fugue for piano in 1884. In the 1884 work, the model is much more obviously Bach than in the precursor-work of 1868. The “chorale” is worked out by Franck along the lines of a chaconne (melodic variations over a repeated slow chordal progression). The “fugue,” in dramatically summing up the musical argument and in providing the catharsis, functions as it does in Bach’s fugues with linked movements, such as his Passacaglia and Fugue in C-Minor, to suggest an apotheosis of the theme.

Widor, who could trace his musical ancestry through a line of keyboard pedagogues all the way back to Bach, believed in mastery of fugue as the foundation both of performance and composition; he famously drilled his composition classes, which he inherited from Franck, in the rigors of imitative counterpoint. While Widor’s oeuvre contains only a few free-standing fugues, his biographers attest his ability to improvise ambitious fugues spontaneously at the keyboard. The little Fugue á Trois Parties sur le Nom de Haydn for piano gives the impression of Widor’s having improvised and transcribed it simultaneously; the same might be said of the fugal second movement of the Organ Symphony Op. 13, No. 4 (1872). Widor used fugue and fugal textures in many of his large-scale compositions, including those for orchestra, either alone or concertante, and orchestra-with-chorus. The most impressive example comes with the fourth-movement finale of the Symphonie Antique, Op. 83 (1911) for soloists, chorus, organ, and orchestra. Widor draws the thematic content of the Symphonie as a whole from two Gregorian chants, Te Deum and Lauda Sion, while modeling his musical structure on the fourth-movement pattern Beethoven’s Choral Symphony, which also culminates in a gigantic fugue. (Regrettably the Symphonie Antique has not yet made its way to the Internet.)

As for Vierne, who served as Widor’s assistant at Saint-Sulpice and eventually became the titulaire at Notre Dame in Paris – he continued in Widor’s path. Like his mentor, Vierne wrote “symphonies” for organ alone. Vierne endowed his second such “symphony” (1903) with a stately fugue for its second movement. Vierne knew his Bach well: In 1928 at the keyboard of the Cavaillé-Coll organ in Notre Dame he let be recorded his performance of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in E-Minor.

D'Indy, in his orchestral Symphony No. 2 in B-Flat (1902-3), had recourse in the finale to fugal practice. Indeed, the Symphony’s fourth movement takes the form of a studious prelude and fugue, on Bach’s model, as refracted through the harmonic-instrumental prism of the French Late-Romantic style. Marked “Lent - Modérément Lent - Extrêmement Lent,” this movement (beginning at 29 minutes into the clip) unfolds slowly with cool graciousness adding layers of complexity in the phases of the fugue. The theme of the fugue proves to derive from the recurrent motto, first exposed in the opening bars of the first movement, which now returns in its original form, in the stretto of the fugue, in the form of a chorale. Writing forty years ago in an essay on the French symphony, Laurence Davies found d’Indy’s work “stifling, intimidating.” More recently, however, Richard Freed in notes for a recorded performance declared the same work “the most beautiful of all French symphonies.” As Davies misidentifies the concluding movement as an “Allegro,” and seems to be working from a vague memory of the score, Freed must trump Davies. D’Indy’s fugue completes the symbolic journey that his Symphony describes – from the dark night of the soul to gracious redemption.

Like Widor, whose office of titulaire at Saint-Sulpice he inherited in 1934, and Vierne, with both of whom he studied, Dupré assumed the career of an organist-composer who intended his compositions mainly for his own execution on his own instrument. Dupré’s many independent fugues for organ attest not only the brilliance of the French contrapuntal tradition in the first half of the Twentieth Century, but also the continued relevance of fugue in the arena of serious musical expression in the same period. A recording from 1957, of Dupré improvising on the Klais organ in the Cologne Cathedral, hints at the deep internalization of the contrapuntal ethos that the man achieved through a lifetime of rigorous discipline; Dupré invents first a passacaglia, itself no mean feat of the musical imagination, and then a double fugue, astonishing in its self-confidence, logic, and verve. Dupré wrote two “books” of preludes and fugues, his Opus 7 (1912) and his Opus 36 (1938), each comprising three numbered (and paired) items. Later he wrote a Chorale et Fugue (1962) and a set of Four Modal Fugues (1968). The items of Opus 7 are: Prélude et Fugue (B-Major), Prélude et Fugue (F-Minor), and Prélude et Fugue (G-Minor). The items of Opus 36 are: Prélude et Fugue (E-Minor), Prélude et Fugue (A-Flat-Major), and Prélude et Fugue (C-Major).

The American organist Frederick C. Mayer wrote of Dupré after sitting with him in the organ loft at Saint-Sulpice during the regular Sunday Mass that he gave the impression of “a great artist imbued with… profound religious faith”; Mayer invoked such terms as “mysticism, sublimity, and exaltation” to describe Dupré’s music in both its compositional and performative aspects.

Of Charles Koechlin (pronounced not as it would be in German but as in French, with a hard c and a nasalized, disappearing n), musicologist Wilfrid Mellers has written, in Studies in Contemporary Music (1947) that he “is among the very select number of contemporary composers who really matter – matters, that is, for the distinction of his mind and sensibility, for he has no revolutionary part to play in musical history.” The work of Koechlin that is relevant here, his Offrande musicale sur le nom de BACH (Op. 187), had only just been written when Mellers was commenting and had not yet been performed; in fact, the Offrande had only one performance in its composer’s lifetime and had no second performance until sixty years after his death. Koechlin’s title looks back to Bach’s own Musikalisches Opfer (1747) and to Liszt’s Prelude and Fugue on B.A.C.H., but the Offrande is, if possible, on the same mighty scale as Bach’s score and more ambitious than Liszt’s.

If in works like Das Musikalische Opfer and The Art of the Fugue Bach subsumed the whole of musical evolution up to his own activity, then in the Offrande one would need to say that Koechlin did the same, subsuming Bach and Liszt in the process. For large orchestra – which, however, pares itself down to a chamber ensemble and even to a piano solo in places – the Offrande requires nearly an hour for its performance. While not every section of the Offrande is a fugue, every section is fugal, from the opening chorale (on the B-A-C-H theme) to the penultimate fugue symétrique and the peroration-like finale. The Offrande will never be a concert favorite but it will certainly impress itself on a knowing connoisseurship as one of the indisputably great works of the Western contrapuntal tradition.

We come now to the Austro-German mainstream of fugue’s modern itinerary – to Mahler, Strauss, and Reger. Mahler, the eldest of the three, earned his reputation in his lifetime as a rigorous and demanding conductor of orchestras and gradually after his death in 1911 as the composer of ten or eleven, depending on whether one includes Das Lied von der Erde, massive symphonies and three or four sets of orchestra songs.

Mahler availed himself of large-scale fugal procedure three times in his symphonies – in the Rondo-Finale of his Fifth Symphony (1902), in the choral Veni Creator Spiritus of his Eighth Symphony (1908), and in the third-movement Burlesk of his Ninth Symphony (1909). Mahler’s Rondo-Finale has the same function in his Fifth Symphony as the concluding Lento does in d’Indy’s Second Symphony – celebrating the passage from the melancholy “Dark Night of the Soul” to redemptive illumination. Mahler wrote his Fifth to celebrate his marriage, after a stormy courtship, to Alma Schindler and his Rondo-Finale does so extravagantly with a type of knowing, “see what I can do” virtuosity during the course of which, to revert to the organist’s vocabulary, he pulls out all the stops. As Michael Kennedy writes in his 1974 study of the composer: “It is a brilliant display combining fugue and rondo, the main theme assembled from fragments hinted at the start, each theme emerging effortlessly from its predecessor, the Adagietto theme [of the preceding movement] made joyous in a quick tempo.” Mahler, Kennedy writes, “had a sense of fun.” Kurt Blaukopf, in his study of Mahler (1969), traces the inspiration of the movement to the summer of 1900: “On a walk through the woods… Mahler and some friends came upon a country fair, with barrel organs blaring from all the roundabouts, swings, shooting-booths and Punch-and-Judy shows, mixed with the strains of a military band and a male choir, all of which on that clearing, ‘regardless of
one another produced an incredible noise.’” Mahler is supposed to have said, “That’s polyphony.”

Blaukopf’s anecdote communicates with the anthropological “theory of fugue” being developed in this essay and its precursor. In the previous essay to this one, we argued that fugue consolidated itself during the social conflict and civilizational breakdown of the Thirty Years War – the religious conflict that saw a one-third reduction in the population of Northern Europe. We argued that fugue represented the characteristic phases of civic dissolution and social crisis that were characteristic of the period. Carnivals and fairs also mimic dissolution and crisis, but in safety so that the intense emotions provoked by the situation can be experienced in joy rather than in fear. Mahler’s remark – “That’s polyphony” – suggests that he intuited these same connections. Interestingly the basic meaning of the word polyphony is “many voices,” as of a crowd, either boisterous or angry.

In the Eighth Symphony (1906), Mahler uses fugue to evoke the psychic intensity of religious exaltation. The Eighth is a choral-orchestral symphony in two parts – the opening Veni Creator Spiritus (“Come, Creator-Spirit”) based on a medieval hymn and the following, much longer, setting of the final scene of Goethe’s Faust, Part II. The outstanding fugal passage – it is in fact a fully worked-through double fugue – comes in the first part, the Veni Creator, beginning at the words “accende lumen sensibus.” (The moment comes at 12.20 into the clip.) Kennedy writes, “This movement has an irresistible vitality, rushing headlong to its apotheosis.” In the Ninth Symphony (1909), Mahler reverts to purely instrumental forces. Commentators invariably cite the work as having profound autobiographical connotations, which it undoubtedly does: Mahler’s marriage was failing; his health was deteriorating – the Ninth is “dark” in comparison with the Eighth. The third of four movements, the Rondo-Burleske, has the form of a prelude-and-double-fugue, but if Mahler were conjuring the spirit of Bach he would be doing so in a mood of ironic grotesquery. The label “burlesque” implies as much. Mahler’s Rondo-Burleske anticipates the fugues and fugal passages of Paul Hindemith (1895 – 1963) and Dmitri Shostakovich (1906 – 1975), especially the latter’s.

Like Mahler, Strauss was a virtuoso of orchestral counterpoint, in whose compositions every variety of fugue and fugato writing appears. Strauss’s mastery of fugato or fugue-like writing that falls short of rigorous fugal procedure appears to great effect in the “Battle” section (beginning at 1.40 into the clip) of the tone-poem Ein Heldenleben or A Hero’s Life (1899). In its instrumental textures, all clashing, independent lines, the “Battle” resembles Mahler’s Rondo-Burleske not a little. Strauss gives listeners a proper fugue in the most famous of his tone-poems, Also Sprach Zarathustra (1896). The “Science Fugue” is noteworthy for being based on a theme that contains all twelve notes of the chromatic scale. As much as Mahler was in the Rondo-Finale of the Fifth Symphony, Strauss is here demonstrating his craft and deftness, as if daring other composers to show him up. Only Strauss could outdo Strauss, however, which he went on to do in the autobiographical-programmatic Sinfonia Domestica (1903). The Sinfonia allegedly gives an account – in purely instrumental terms – of a single day in the Strauss family household. The final section of the Sinfonia, entitled “Awakening and Merry Dispute,” purports (very plausibly) to depict the late-night awakening of the youngest child, an argument between husband and wife as to whose turn it is to see to the baby, and their reconciliation once the baby is quieted – all in the form of a magnificent triple fugue. Strauss’s triple fugue is close in its comedic aplomb and tongue-in-cheek fun-making to Mahler’s Rondo-Finale. Strauss’s triple fugue also once again illustrates the relation of fugal procedure to the idea of crisis – here a mere domestic one, amorously resolved after the stretto.

When the Japanese government invited Strauss to contribute a new score to the celebration of 2000 years of the Japanese Kingdom, the composer produced a free-standing orchestral prelude-and-fugue under the generic label Japanische Festmusik (1940). Fugal elements are prominent in the third-movement Finale of the first of the two Sonatinas (so-called) for sixteen wind instruments that Strauss composed in the Indian summer of his compositional career just after World War II.

The case of Reger is a peculiar one: Tremendously productive although short-lived (a mere forty-three at his death – seven years younger than Mahler at his death), Reger synthesized baroque practice with the expanded harmonic vocabulary and novel instrumental resources of the fin-de-siècle, while also carrying on the composer-performer tradition that had been marked out by Franz Liszt. One exaggerates only slightly in claiming that hardly anything that Reger composed was not fugal or a fugue. Reger made particularly his own the convention of variations-with-fugue, composing sets of them (ceaselessly, it seems) for all genres – piano or organ solo, chamber ensemble, orchestra, and chorus-with-orchestra. Sometimes he formalized the variations as a passacaglia, one of his favorite devices along with fugue, or as a “fantasy.” From Reger’s early creativity for organ solo is, as might be expected, a Fantasy and Fugue on B.A.C.H. (Op. 46), quite as maniacal, and even more densely textured, than Liszt’s under the same title. From roughly the same period comes the Toccata and Fugue in D-Minor (Op. 59), challenging Bach on his own turf. Exploiting the organ’s ability to imitate symphonic resources, Reger wrote his Introduction, Passacaglia, and Fugue in E Minor (Op. 127), in 1913. For piano, Reger wrote his variation-and-fugue sets on Bach (Op. 81), Beethoven (Op. 86), and Telemann (Op. 183). The Beethoven Variations also exist in a version for orchestra and makes an imperssive triptych with the Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Johann Adam Hiller for Orchestra Op. 100 (1907) and the Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Mozart Op. 132 (1914).

Perhaps a small dose of Reger goes a long way for casual listeners. Nevertheless there is something fascinating in the relentlessness with which Reger goes about developing his basic materials – and in the Hiller and Mozart scores particularly he approaches the freedom in felicity of Strauss.

I omit any discussion of Russian counterpoint in the Twentieth Century although fugue had a great master during the Soviet period. Let us postpone the matter of Dmitri Shostakovich until another occasion. I should like to bring the present survey to conclusion with a consideration of the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók (1881 – 1945), who, like Strauss and Reger, has links to Liszt, but whose music sounds much more “modern” than theirs – leaner in orchestration and less prone to rhetoric. Bartók chooses to begin his four-movement Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (1936) with a slow fugue (Andante Tranquillo) in what his commentators usually call his Nachtmusik- or “Night-Music” style. The theme, as in the case of Strauss’s “Science” fugue, is heavily chromatic; the atmosphere is shadowy, heavy with implication, and phantasmagoric. Bartók chooses to conclude his Piano Concerto No.3 (1945) with a third-movement Allegro Vivace in the form of a rondo with a central fugal section – the thematic material being based on Hungarian folksong.

It is in the fifth and final movement, marked Presto, of Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra (1944), however, that we find what must be the fugal tour-de-force of the first half of the last century. As Halsey Stevens remarks in The Life and Music of Béla Bartók (1953) – speaking of the Concerto as a whole – “contrapuntal possibilities are motivating forces in Bartók’s choice of materials; it is sometimes surprising to find a theme which has apparently been conceived as an entity combining with itself in canon of all kinds, both rectus and inversus, and elaborate stretto, and to realize that this thematic adaptability is never adventitious.” Concerning the fifth movement, Stevens writes: “The finale reverts to the dance rhythms that appear in so many of Bartók’s larger works. Here the two principal ideas are a sort of ‘perpetual motion’ in the violins, out of whose ebullition numerous motives take form, and abroad fugue subject whose manipulations are extremely complex, embodying augmentation and diminution in several ratios, the expected inversion, and quadruple stretti.”

And yet there is something in Bartók’s fugue that Stevens, for all his technical competence, fails to hear – something that ties this fugue into our anthropological theory of fugue as the musical representation of a mimetic crisis of either the tragic or comic variety. The striking, folkloric motifs that eventually furnish the theme for Bartók’s virtuosic development have the rhythmic and harmonic characteristics of laughter. Now laughter itself, which has a range of possible meanings from the threatening to the ecstatic, is above all imitative: When one person laughs, supposing he laugh hard enough, other people begin to laugh with him, as though by contagion. Bartók’s laughter is not here sardonic or threatening; it is close to the ideal of laughter, as defined by Henri Bergson in his Essay on the Meaning of the Comic: The healthy laughter of a community, happy after the feast, that for a moment steps outside the rigidity of everyday life and enjoys the freedom of the carnival – even to seeing the ridiculousness in its own usual bourgeois priggishness. This type of laughter – and this type of fugue – is an access of grace. That Bartók could have written these remarkable pages while dying of leukemia makes them all the more necessary and astonishing.
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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I Get a Kick out of Fugue

Walt Disney's Fantasia, with
"Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 565"
By: Johann Sebastian Bach

I Get a Kick out of Fugue:
Mêlée and Free Play in the Most Abstract of Western Musical Forms
By: Thomas F. Bertonneau

The most famous fugue – we shall come to a definition of the term in good time – is Johann Sebastian Bach’s fugue from his Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, intended for the organ. Supposing Bach (1685 – 1750) to have written the score and not someone else, as a number of modern scholars have claimed, the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor dates probably from the last decade of the composer’s life, when his longstanding interest in fugal procedure intensified, yielding latterly the immense and daunting Art of the Fugue, its final quadruple fugue unfinished at the master’s death. Uniquely among the innumerable representatives of its genre, Bach’s “D Minor” succeeded in penetrating popular awareness. It did so in connection with the Walt Disney film Fantasia (1940), for the opening sequence of which the über-romantic conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, adapted his arrangement of Bach's organ-score for an immense modern symphonic ensemble. Stokowski’s version dates back to the late 1920s. He had been performing it in his concerts as a “curtain raiser,” which it undeniably is, for a decade when Disney lured him to the immortalizing Fantasia “gig.” The Toccata and Fugue in D Minor stands out in Fantasia, coming right at the beginning, for being the only sequence in the film whose visual accompaniment avoids the naively picturesque in favor of purely coloristic and geometrical effects. It is the only sequence that is not Kitsch. The “D Minor” turns up in another Disney film fifteen years later. Captain Nemo of the submarine Nautilus plays it for Professor Arronax in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1954). In one of the 1950s Hammer Studios vampire ventures, Count Dracula lets on his affection for the same piece in an impromptu keyboard recital for his guests.

Very likely, the millions of people who have seen Fantasia, and who remember the music of the film’s opening sequence, will not recall the name of the composition; nor will the score’s generic affiliation (fugue) have meant anything to them particularly. Nevertheless, those people will have responded, with the help of Disney’s visual coaching, to the inevitable emotional trajectory of Bach’s complex counterpoint in Stokowski’s colorful orchestration. Musically and rhetorically, fugue exerts the effect of enthralling the listener to participate in the imaginative equivalent of flight, pursuit, and redemption – or flight, pursuit, and transfiguration. As always when in speaking of music, the exegete resorts to metaphor. Yet the very name fugue affirms the metaphoric image, for it means to fly or to flee, as from danger, to take on the role of refugee, and to brave hazards in order to reach asylum; the name fugue also refers to the situation that motivates flight – the mayhem of an emergent crisis, the breakdown of prohibitions, and the scramble for resources suddenly scarce. Again fugal procedure seems to reflect basic human nature. Human beings, wrote Aristotle, are the most imitative (mimetic) of all animals. In a crisis, people imitate one another – heading for the same narrow doorway or crowding the same sinking lifeboat.

The basic gesture of fugue is imitation: the “voices” (the term appears in quotation-marks because fugue, as it develops historically, is quintessentially an instrumental genre) mimic one another by appropriating the theme in such a way that it comes into counterpoint with itself. In the seventeenth century, before the term became more or less settled, compositions using fugal procedure often bore the name of caccia, Italian for “chase” or “hunt” – a word with close semantic relations to flight, fleeing, and taking refuge insofar as every quarry must have its hunter. Just as a steeple chase or horserace has its “final stretch” so too a fugue has its stretto, during which the action of the drama undergoes intensification through the thickening of the texture (the deliberate crowding of the voices) and the division (“dismemberment” would not be an inappropriate usage) of the theme before its final, reconciling unison-restatement, often as a chorale with the note-values augmented. The foregoing is the general outline, for example, of Bach’s “D-Minor.” One of the most marvelous explanations of what it means, in music, to fugue was undertaken on Canadian television fifty years ago by the redoubtable pianist-raconteur Glenn Gould – his own composition, for voices and string quartet, How to Write a Fugue. Listeners should remark the crucial element of conflict in the unfolding of the theme during its development. Gould’s approach is ironic and humorous, but the presentation is pedagogically efficient. The Swingle Singers execute a similarly ironic and humorous “take” on Bach’s G-Minor Fugue (BWV 578), an illuminating, jazzed-up companion-piece to Gould’s fugue.

Bach’s fugues and Gould’s faux Bach fugue represent respectively the acme of fugal composition in the mid-Eighteenth Century and the meritorious modern parody of the contrapuntal ethos. Early fugues were sometimes called by their composers, ricercari, from the Italian for “investigation” or “introspection.” The term fantasia was used interchangeably with ricercar. Such works, from the late-Sixteenth through the Seventeenth Centuries, tend to be less monumental and dramatic in their conception than the fugues proper of the High Baroque, especially those of Bach. They reveal, on the other hand, in their quiet way and as their nomenclature would suggest the meditative character of the contrapuntal art, its function as the expression in tone of pure imaginative genius at the highest levels of rigor and abstraction. Listeners will find a good example of this proto-genre in the Echo Fantasia in the Aeolian Mode by Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562 – 1621). They will find another in the Preludium und Fugue in A-Minor (BuxWV 153) by Dietrich Buxtehude (1627 – 1707). Buxtehude provides the connection between Sweelinck, one of the chief figures of the “Netherlands Polyphonists,” and Bach, who knew Sweelinck’s work well. Sweelinck in his Echo Fantasia develops his theme in a series of variation-episodes each of which exceeds its precursor in contrapuntal complexity. Buxtehude “warms up” with his Prelude, now so called, and follows up with his Fugue, in which the “subject” or theme remains identifiable throughout.

Paul Mark Walker in his Theories of Fugue from the Age of Josquin to the Age of Bach (2000) devotes a chapter to “German Theory during the Thirty years War.” Walker remarks the context in which musicology produced the earliest fully explicit scientific doctrine of fugue: “The Thirty years War (1618 – 1648) plunged Germany into one of the darkest periods in its history. Although most of the combatants were foreign, the fighting took place almost entirely on German soil, and its effects were felt in nearly every aspect of German life.” In a period when being hunted and harried by sectarian armies were common experiences, and when the symptoms of social breakdown in town and countryside were familiar to all, it is unsurprising that the convention (so to speak) of fugue should appear to its practitioners as increasingly serious and representative. Walker quotes the theorist Johannes Nucius: “A musical genius must be considered greatest of all if, in accordance with the fixed nature of the modes, he knows how to bring to light suitable fugues and to join them properly and in a coherent way.” In a time of social disorganization, fugue symbolizes the ideals of coherence and order.

Listeners will hear the musical equivalent of a search for order amidst disorder in the Toccata and Fugue in D-Major by Johann Jakob Froberger (1616 – 1667) and in the Präludium, Fugue, und Finale in G-Major by J. C. F. Fischer (1656 – 1746), a devotional enshrinement of order achieved. Fischer’s theme characteristically for the period resembles a chorale, which reminds us that fugue emerges with the great Protest in the German North. Johann Pachelbel (1653 – 1706), whose Canon in D-Major graces weddings ubiquitously, inhabits the same musical world as Froberger and Fischer, as his Fugue in D Major and his Fugues on the Magnificat Nos. 3, 5, 6, 8, and 9 testify. One could multiply the names of the German baroque composers almost indefinitely, extending also the numberless instances of late-Seventeenth and early-Eighteenth Century fugue; perhaps at no other time has abstract music of the highest order under the most stringent rules – and yet giving the impression of great freedom – been composed regularly and naturally by so many likeminded artists. The stately Prelude and Fugue in B-Flat Major by Johann Kuhnau (1660 – 1722), accompanied in the video-clip by a graphic realization of the score, will provide one further example.

There is no avoiding the fact, however, that of the names associated with fugue none looms higher into the musical stratosphere than that of Bach – the Bach, as musicologists designate him so as to distinguish him from his father and uncles, his brothers, his cousins, and his numerous children. The Bach family constituted, all by itself, a great guild of composer-musicians and music theorists. Johann Sebastian brought the fugal style to its astonishing consummation, not only in the many compositions from his hand that bear the title of fugue, but in almost everything that he composed. In a comparison of Bach and George Frederick Handel, the musicologist Wilfrid Mellers once summed up the difference this way (I paraphrase): Even when Handel fugues, he dances; and even when Bach dances, he fugues. Fugal thinking permeates Bach’s creativity and gives rise to the colossally abstract yet magnificently vital score that obsessed him in his final years – The Art of the Fugue. Those who experience an arousal of curiosity may listen to the entire Art (it runs in performance around seventy-five minutes) as arranged for organ and played by Helmut Walcha, as arranged for piano and played by Grigory Sokolov, as arranged for string quartet and played by the Quartetto Italiano, or as arranged by Jordi Savall for his baroque group Hesperion. But before The Art there came the series of organ works and the two volumes (1722, 1742) of The Well-Tempered Clavier, intended either for harpsichord or piano, complementary sets of twenty-four preludes and fugues in every possible key.

The fugal works of Bach illustrate the full gamut of species in the genre. The fugues “linked” two paragraphs back, written by the generation of composers who were elder contemporaries of Bach, are all “simple” fugues – they are composed, that is, on a single theme that comes into counterpoint only with itself and with a few passing accompaniments. But fuguing on single theme hardly exhausts the combinatory possibilities of the convention: A fugue might be constructed on two, three, or four themes, presented either simultaneously in the exposition or in successive expositions, and then combined in the development. Listeners will hear clearly the procedure of double fugue in Bach’s Prelude and Double Fugue in G-Sharp Minor (No. 18 from WTC II) and in Nos. 9 and 10 from Art of the Fugue, in an arrangement for string orchestra. Pianist Richard Grayson, in homage to Bach, has improvised a Double Fugue on the James Bond and Pink Panther Themes, in the same humorous vein as Glenn Gould’s How to Write a Fugue. Grayson’s improvisation, like Gould’s pastiche, is highly instructive. For a lesson in triple fugue, the listener could hardly do better than to turn to Bach’s “Saint Anne Fugue” in E-Flat Major, the second part of one of its composer’s many Prelude-and-Fugue scores; in this case, the three themes, because they are memorable by themselves and quite distinct from one another, enable the listener to “follow the argument” with admirable clarity. Fugue No. 8 from The Art of the Fugue is also a triple fugue.

Quadruple fugue being the greatest challenge its exemplars are fewer in number than in the cases of simple, double, or triple fugue. The logic of The Art of the Fugue strongly suggests that Bach intended the final “Contrapunctus” (No. 14) to be a quadruple fugue, but Bach died leaving the composition unfinished. The derelict state of the conception has tempted many a later composer to try his hand at “completing” it. Notable attempts have been made in recent years, as for example in the reconstruction by Zoltán Göncz for organ and the reconstruction by Vyacheslav Gryaznov for piano. That fugue is a colossally abstract enterprise cannot be gainsaid. At the same time, the abstraction of fugue can become a vehicle for intensely personal expression, which is the case in The Art. Bach has signified the spiritual-autobiographical character of the score by structuring one of its recurring themes on musical note-equivalences with the letters of his surname – the famous B.A.C.H. theme later appropriated commemoratively by other composers. (In Göncz’s reconstruction, we hear this theme at eight minutes into the clip.)

It belongs to the history of music after Bach’s death that his successors in the Austro-German tradition – particularly Franz Joseph Haydn (1732 – 1809), Wolfgang Mozart (1756 – 1791), and Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 – 1827) – came to important junctures in the maturation of their styles through their rediscovery of Bach and the fugal art. Haydn began composing at the moment when the taste of the traditional music-patrons, the nobility and aristocracy of Europe, turned away from the complexity and seriousness of the High Baroque towards a new “Gallant” style that avoided counterpoint for the homophonic procedures of sonata-structure. Haydn’s early work corresponds to the new simplicity, but by the point in his creativity marked by his middle symphonies, he had discovered that sonata-structure could be wedded with fugue to heighten the drama of tonality. A good example is the Finale of his Symphony No. 40 in F-Major (1763). Mozart’s encounter with Bach gave rise in 1782 to the twenty-eight-year-old composer’s set of six Preludes-and-Fugues for String Trio, of which the first and the second give the flavor. In the trios, the fugal practice is distinctly playful. In Mozart’s Adagio and Fugue in C-Minor (1788), we confront a noticeably more darkly colored essay on the convention, whose solemnity the minor key in the title already indicates.

The study of Bach deepened the seriousness of Beethoven’s already serious music and gave rise to fugal compositions that actually rival those of Bach in their audacity and genius. Beethoven’s overture, Consecration of the House (1822) has the form of a large-scale orchestral prelude and fugue; one can imagine it transcribed for organ, just many of Bach’s fugal scores for keyboard have been transcribed for orchestra. In three late works by Beethoven the fructifying influence of Bach makes itself especially strongly felt. These three are Missa Solemnis (completed 1823) the Ninth Symphony (1824); and the Great Fugue (Grosse Fuge), Op.133, originally the Finale of the String Quartet No. 13 (1825), later published separately. In Missa Solemnis, Beethoven has recourse to large-scale fugal procedure in the Credo and the Gloria, for which he took as his model the fugal movements in Bach’s Mass in B-Minor (1724). In Some Masterpieces of European Religious Music (2002), Wilfrid Mellers (whom I earlier paraphrased apropos Bach) writes of the Gloria that it can be analyzed as a four-part symphony with a fugal finale; Mellers describes the Gloria as “contrarious in rhythm,” “dislocated in tonality,” and “cataclysmic.” In another book, The Sonata Principle (1962), Mellers describes Beethoven’s instrumental fugues, including the Grosse Fuge, as “almost unplayable” because in each strives musically and metaphysically after “an experience that is unattainable.” Schiller’s An die Freude (originally, An die Freiheit), familiar from the vocal parts of the Ninth Symphony, is perhaps a verbal symbol of the same unreachable spiritual transfiguration. I link to a video-clip of the Great Fugue that animates the score and so helps the listener to
follow the argument.

The post-Beethovenian master of the fugue in the middle of the Nineteenth Century was Franz Liszt (1811 – 1886). In Revolution and Religion in the Music of Liszt (1987), Paul Merrick devotes a chapter to the meaning of fugue in Liszt’s work. According to Merrick (I paraphrase), fugue signified for Liszt the highest devotional exertion of the soul in musical praise of God. Fugues occur in Liszt’s two symphonies – the Faust Symphony (1857) and the Dante Symphony (1857) – and in several of his thirteen “Symphonic Poems.” The fugue in Prometheus (1850) is particularly noteworthy. Fugues also occur in Liszt’s masses and psalms, but the outstanding fugue in Liszt’s oeuvre is undoubtedly the one in his Präludium und Fuge über B.A.C.H. (1856; revised 1870, where the designation “Fantasy” replaces “Präludium”), originally for organ but transcribed also for piano. By employing the B.A.C.H. theme from The Art of the Fugue, Liszt declared his profound debt to the Leipzig Master. Liszt’s fugue is a highly chromatic fugue, which moves toward a kind of controlled atonality. Not for no reason has the Präludium-und-Fuge on B.A.C.H. been cited as an anticipation of Twentieth Century developments in music.

As I hope to write a follow-up to this essay exploring the destiny of fugue in the second half of the Nineteenth and again in the Twentieth Century, I will close by remarking the inclination of Twentieth Century composers to arrange Bach’s keyboard works, especially his organ fugues, for the modern symphony orchestra. We have already considered Stokowski’s famous arrangement of the Toccata and Fugue in D-Minor. There is also an arrangement of the “D-Minor” by Eugene Ormandy, Stokowski’s successor at the Philadelphia orchestra. Ormandy recorded transcriptions by other hands, such as Sir Edward Elgar’s arrangement of Bach’s Fantasy and Fugue in C-Minor. Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C-Minor has attracted three arrangers – Stokowski, who recorded it many times, Ottorino Respighi (1879 – 1936), and René Leibowitz (1913 – 1972), whose version for two orchestras placed on either side of the stage really puts the contrapuntal marvel of the piece in full relief. Two revolutionary modernists, Arnold Schoenberg (2874 – 1951) and his pupil Anton Webern (1883 – 1945) made transcriptions of Bach’s fugal art. Schoenberg transcribed “St. Anne Fugue” in 1928; in Schoenberg’s version, the work seems completely modern, or rather it transcends any contingent place or time, speaking to us, as it were, from the Platonic Realm. Webern transcribed the concluding Ricercar a 6 from Bach’s Musical Offering (1747) in 1934 and 35, which likewise emphasizes the timelessness of the original. Gustav Holst (1874 – 1934), best known for his suite The Planets, crafted a wind-orchestra version of Bach’s sprightly Fugue à la Gigue in D-Minor.

Many arrangements exist of The Art of the Fugue. We have already linked to Savall’s, for a small orchestra of period instruments. An outstanding Art in orchestral garb comes from the hand of conductor Hermann Scherchen – heard in the second of his two transcriptions, this one for mixed small ensemble, from 1961 or 62. An English conductor, Neville Marriner, prepared a version of The Art in the 1970s for his Academy of St.-Martin-in-the Fields. The Art has been arranged for brass ensemble, for guitar duo, for saxophone quartet, and even for percussion ensemble. It seems appropriate to name the name of Ward Swingle (born 1927) once again: His “jazz-voice” transcriptions, mainly from The Well-Tempered Clavier, tell us that there was a high end to popular culture in the early 1960s. Readers who have come this far will be rewarded by Swingle’s arrangement of Bach’s Fugue in C-Major.
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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Vladimir Horowitz Plays Mozart; Who Does Bach Justice?

I got this comment from Rick at Reflecting Light on my earlier post on Mozart's Piano Sonata in A Major, K331, Andante Grazioso:

I have been listening to Mozart recordings quite a bit in the past few days. All symphonies from his "middle period" -- starting with no. 30, up to 35. I've enjoyed the performances although they're quite different.

Charles Mackerras and the Prague Chamber Orchestra: Mackerras was going through his horse-race period, no doubt influenced by the so-called "authentic" performance style. Most tempos way too fast, brash accents ... but Mackerras was a genius, and the rowdiness was tempered by a sensitivity to melody and phrasing. (He later got over that style, and some of his last recordings were of Mozart with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, wonderful readings.)

Colin Davis and the Staatskapelle Dresden: From the '70s but in typically excellent Decca sound. I cannot praise these recordings highly enough. Davis saw the light and imparted his vision to the fine orchestra in the city that was a smoking ruin only 30 years earlier.

Rick

I agree with Rick. There is a "horse-race" tendency in musicians today, and not just in Mozart. Bach's violin concertos are case in point. Performers compensate for this flight from the piece in different ways. Rick observes the brash accents; I notice a "prettification" of the music.

One of the things I was trained in as a choir performer and while studying piano, is how not to gallop off - it is apparently a natural tendency. It is not simply a matter of giving each note its due, but of controlling our internal rhythm, so we don't allow it to accelerate while singing or playing a piece of music. I think that there are also those with natural musical ability for whom this reining-in is easier. Not every-one can be a musician.

Here is perhaps my favorite piece of music: Bach's violin concerto in A minor, and specifically the first movement. There are performances where the movement is played too fast, bolting aggressively off into some far horizon.

Isaac Stern, in the video below, does it full justice, giving it a delicate grandeur. I love the stretches of yearning by the violin solo.


Bach violin concerto in A minor, First Movement, given an Allegro or an Allegro Assai tempo
Isaac Stern & the English Chamber Orchestra

Probably a composer who can be played in this "horse-race" manner is Vivaldi.

I wrote here about a choral concert by a "Korean-American" concert choir I attended in New York. One thing that struck me was the accelerated speed at which the choir (and the soloists) sang.

This seems to be a contemporary phenomenon. I don't think it is simply a display of virtuoso. I think people are bored with the music, and they don't spend the required time to play the notes, but rather gallop on to finish the pieces. Sitting and listening (like sitting and reading) requires a certain patience, a certain ability to leave the galloping world alone for a while. The world now is full of gallopers, from the fast car highways to the instant connections on the internet highway. Speech (conversation) is also becoming more jumbled and faster, as though people cannot string together words fast enough. So if the audience is based on the galloping type, I suppose the orchestra is also of the same ilk, not just because they want to deliver what they audience wants, but because they really are in tune (in the same wave length) as the modern concert-goer. Speed, expediency (the psychologists have a term for it - Attention Deficit Disorder) is part of contemporary man's make-up.

I also think this is why the Korean choral group performed in the manner it did. It is not "in tune" with Western music, so its interpretation is to get through - virtuoso manner - the musical piece. I wrote about this same lack of sensitivity in the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, an Asian-dominated orchestra group, in the same blog post Asians Playing Western Music.

I wrote in the post:

As the [choral] concert progressed, I began to realize a certain "prettiness" in the performance, a lack of force, drive and even drama. I don't think this is simply a cultural phenomenon (as in misunderstanding the Messiah's content, message, meaning, etc...). I think it is a physio/cerebral problem. I've seen it happen in art and design, and even in science... At some level, I think Asians demonstrate some ability (i.e. memorization, or fast, scale-like exercises). But there seems to be an inability to create a synthesized beauty, which is what much of art (and order in Science) is about.

Perhaps this galloping-off by white members of orchestra and other musical ensembles is also influenced by this multicultural environment, where the deep study of the Western music is being overshadowed by other things like audience appeasement, and non-white (and specifically East Asian) dominance in classical music.
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat