Yes - I agree that Ross's performance is too rapid. This is just a nice little 3-part Invention, and Tovey's relatively unslithy notion that a tempo of Allegretto is appropriate seems reasonable. But by this reckoning I think the crackpot version is probably a little too slow. The opening semiquaver patterns are not in themselves melodic, but present a decorated melody (moving initially against the 'tenor' voice). Played too slowly, they lose their decorative aspect and become pseudo-melodic (against a harmonic framework in the LH that already involves 'passing' chords that now seem ponderous). But how to reconcile this need for a more animated tempo with the equally-pressing need (as Mr Grew points out) to give the wonderful suspensions time to make their telling effect is a matter of the finest judgement!

In my view, the person who comes to the rescue is again the wonderful GUSTAV. Here he provides a lovely sense of patterning, which then percolates imitatively and delicately through the whole fabric, but in no way conveying haste. His sense of phrasing and pacing is (in my view) immaculate, and the beautiful sound coming from his well-tempered harpsichord gives a strangely haunting but sonorous affect to the key of B Major in what is surely a uniquely contemplative movement from this collection.

Baz

Possibly this?...



Baz

Assuming as we do the member refers here to the music Webern wrote using the 'method of composing with 12 tones' willed into life by his teacher Szerhnburgh, we should be highly surprised if he were able to point out to us one single instance of a minor second therein - in either harmonic or melodic configuration - Webern having eschewed the interval in favour of its inversions, the major seventh or minor ninth.

I am surprised that Mr Grew (of all people) should not share my conviction that nothing is ever "coincidence" with this composer. It is admittedly rare for such clear musical links between a Prelude and a Fugue, but it is by no means unknown. If the Member should care to consult the organ Prelude and Fugue in G Minor BWV 535 he might note that the entry of the pedal theme in bar 10 is identical in pitch material with the opening of the fugue subject that follows. I should not suppose that this was any more "coincidental" than was the case with the present B Major Prelude and Fugue.

Baz

This B minor Fugue from the first book, presented to-day in its crackpot or cuckoo variant (rapid-share / send-space), is the best of the whole series. In fact it may be that Bach designed it that way - to be a kind of culmination. Schoenberg too praised it, and he pointed out of course that the initial three-bar statement of the Subject contrives - no doubt intentionally because it was the last of the set - to use all twelve notes of the chromatic scale. Yet the case is not the same as one of Schoenberg's "rows" of which the notes are "related to each other only." Firstly several notes in Bach's statement are repeated before the series is complete. Secondly, Bach's notes are related not only to each other but to diatonic scales. His first three notes outline a B minor triad, and are followed by six slurred pairs, the first note of which constitutes in each case a heightening of tension, and the second a lessening or resolution thereof - no doubt another example of those Affekten to which several Members have already made reference. (This seems to conflict with what Schoenberg himself says in the passage quoted below.) The rows of the serialist, while no doubt capable of expressing a certain tension and resolution through their intervallic relationship to each other, are claimed - at least by their partisans - not to have the diatonic system to fall back upon.

While the initial statement contains, as we have said, these sequences of tension and resolution (which mirror in music the whole process of human awareness and thought do not they), at many points later in the Fugue the texture becomes much more complex, so complex in fact that the listener can no longer be certain which quaver of each pair reflects the energetic venturesome spirit and which a point of repose. Bar thirty-nine is one example of many in this regard. (This does agree with what Schoenberg wrote.)

Another point worthy of note is that Beethoven, who like the divine Mozart had studied these Preludes and Fugues in his youth, borrowed - again no doubt intentionally - at the most profound moments of his late quartets several of Bach's figures from this Fugue (among others).

Although this is indeed a fugue in four parts, curiously long stretches of it make use of only three.

Riemann precedes his long analysis of the work with this statement: "I may say that the key of B minor, the same in which Bach wrote his 'Hohe Messe' and many other works of the highest importance, threw him into a state of inspired absorption so that he opened up his inmost soul, and told us of his griefs. But it is no ordinary grief, no feeble groaning and sighing, but a Faust-like search after truth, a true soul-struggle which reveals itself within these bold harmonic enclosures. The supposed uglinesses and intolerable hardnesses disappear entirely from the theme, and indeed from the whole fugue, as soon as one has gained a clear conception of the harmonies and of the metrical structure."

And let Schoenberg too finally speak for himself here: "This fugue approaches a style of chromaticism in a manner different from Bach's ordinary procedure. In general, chromatic alterations appear as ascending or descending substitute leading-tones. But in Fugue 24 the chromatically altered tones are neither substitutes nor parts of scales. They possess distinctly an independence resembling the unrelated tones of the chromatic scale in a basic set of a twelve-tone composition. The only essential difference between their nature and modern chromaticism is that they do not yet take advantage of their multiple meaning as a means of changing direction in a modulatory fashion."

We hope it is not too fast for Bach's own marking of "Largo."

In regard to the Prelude in C sharp minor from Book I we wrote the other day this:


Here is Schoenberg's passage which we have now found:

"The feeling for what is truly new about an idea and its presentation can never be lost, so long as one refuses to stop at the mere externals of the manifest form; nor will one become dulled to its effect. I can say that in all great masterpieces I feel at countless points the thrill of novelty, scarcely less strongly than it must have been felt at the time the work first appeared. For example, in Mozart's Dissonance Quartet I feel it over and over again when there is that daring contradictory entry of the first violin on A, directly after the A flat just left by the viola. Or at the bass's B natural passing against the B sharp in Bach's C sharp minor Prelude. . . . For what is truly new remains as new as it was on the first day." (Quoted in Style and Idea from "On the Question of Modern Composition Teaching" - 1929)

Schoenberg's final sentence, reading...


...must stand out as a paragon of MISLING since inasmuch as it conveys any meaning at all such meaning is utterly erroneous and contrary to the observable facts.

Baz

Yes I do indeed. When the subject is first announced (without any contrapuntal harmonic support) one hears from bar 2 a series of apparently ambiguous chromatic sequences. The notes that stand out as being chromatic are D#, C-natural, E# and B# - but the B# (bar 3) clarifies its status as it begins a cadence - including a G# - in the dominant. So this use of B# is clearly modulatory in purpose, and offers no ambiguity at all. BUT, the previously-heard D#, C-natural and E# remain ambiguous.

However, as the fugue progresses, and other voices enter, the exact nature and purpose of these supposedly chromatic notes acquire a clarity that was initially suppressed (since only a single voice was being presented on their first appearance). We discover in bar 10, through the harmony that arises via the contrapuntal lines, that in fact these "chromaticisms" are not chromatic at all, but that each one asserts a modulation. The D# followed by the C-natural now stand not as being chromatic to the key of B minor, but rather as being diatonic to the new key of E minor. Similarly (in the same bar) the note E# (by virtue of the accompanying note G# in the middle voice) stands not as a supposed chromatic note in relation to B minor, but rather as a diatonic note in relation to yet another new key, this time F# minor (as is further clarified by the melodic move upwards to the D-natural).

In short, therefore, the opening subject, far from providing chromatic notes with regard to the home key (as we might suppose from their apparent unexpected and ambiguous appearance) rather offers unexpected notes that have a diatonic function with regard to new keys (E minor, and F# minor). They are therefore a) ambiguously chromatic on their first appearance, yet b) entirely modulatory in function thereafter.

Baz