Canons and Fugues, Fugues and Canons
Counterpoint has many forms. It can exist as imitation, in which entering voices have a similar melodic fragment, as is often the case in Renaissance masses; it can exist as canon, in which voices are replicated in exact imitation and can be constructed to maddeningly repeat in perpetuity, an example being the famous round of “Frère Jacques”; and it can exist as fugue, a technique in which a musical theme (often called a subject) is introduced in one voice, then repeated in another voice at another pitch, and so on, with these musical themes reappearing throughout the work in some sort of exposition, development, and recapitulation. Alfred Mann describes Bach, in rather omniscient terms, as “the beginning and end but also the perfection and imperfection of fugal art.”1 Bach’s last work, The Art of the Fugue, is certainly worthy of such a description. Conceived as a theoretical exercise with no specified instrumentation, it represents the zenith of combinatorial and contrapuntal virtuosity. In lieu of textual treatises on counterpoint (such as those written by Zarlino, Fux, or Beldemandis), Bach preferred to demonstrate his sophisticated applications of counterpoint in practice, a phenomenon Christoph Wolff calls “Bach the musical scholar.”2 The earliest source of The Art of the Fugue is an autograph manuscript from around 1742. A revised edition was published in 1751 after Bach’s death. This revised edition contains a monumental double fugue on four themes, the Fuga a 3 Sogetti or Contrapunctus XIV, left unfinished. As musicologist Laurence Dreyfus describes it, this final fugue “embraced not only the audacious inclusion of Bach’s monogram (B–A–C–H, understood in German as B flat–A–C–B natural) but also elements of melodic inversion (counterfugue) and stretto (canon), a kind of extended fugal peroration to sum up the entire collection.”3 With 14 fugues and four canons on a single subject in D minor, the work is a display of what is likely the single greatest contrapuntal mind of the common practice period (i.e., the 17th to the beginning of the 20th century). And despite its rather academic formulation,4 the work never tires on the listener, as Edward Said writes describing Bach’s counterpoint: 56
