FUGUE IN D# MINOR (WTC BOOK 2)
Here are some of my thoughts about aspects of interpretation concerning the D# Minor Fugue found in Bach’s WTC Book 2, and I should be very interested in the views that other colleagues may have upon the performance of this piece.


The trouble with Tovey’s assertion is that his view of this fugue does not recognise the occurrence of any real action at all! He likens it also in mood to the opening Kyrie of Bach’s B Minor Mass, and the movement is then seen as a slow, languid affair. He overlooks the fact the Bach specifically inserted the marking Largo into the Kyrie (where the fugue begins at bar 5), indicating that the intention here was to perform that work at a ‘slower-than-normal’ tempo. No such indication is to be found in the D# Minor Fugue, and such a view seems to me to be quite out of character with the general nature and affect of the opening Subject . Why, then, is it nearly always performed very slowly?

HERE is Wanda Landowska performing the piece, and it is difficult to believe that the Fugue alone occupies a mere three pages – so long does the performance take! Indeed, looking at the opening bars of the score...



...one’s mind is filled with horror that at a pace of barely quaver=60 we are surely in for a ‘long haul’! It takes exactly 6 minutes for her to navigate her way through only three pages of music, and this is not even accomplished without some obvious misreadings. Most reasonably competent keyboardists might have managed to read their way through the piece at this speed with little or no effort.

And HERE is a synthesised rendition provided by Mr Grew – the tempo is less slow, and flows along gently. Indeed the tempo here is almost identical to that used in Leonhardt’s recording, though his has some flexibility, pacing, articulation and phrasing.

Then there is the highly inaccurate and depressing recording offered by MR BERBEN in which extreme tardiness causes actual offence since the playing still offers so many completely wrong notes.

I believe there can be only one explanation for such a generally slow speed: anybody at all who ever learns this fugue (no matter how good they are) can only do so by learning the notes at a very slow tempo. The only single note anywhere whose default position on the keyboard corresponds with its position on the staff is the note B (and this is frequently inflected chromatically as well). Every other note is shifted by the key signature, sometimes by a whole tone (in the case of C and often also F). Navigating through this forest of sharps and double sharps is a labour of love, and it takes a very long time indeed successfully to get one’s fingers (and one’s brain) around the correct note pitches. Furthermore, even having successfully accomplished this, the fact is that the key of D# Minor is (at least in this instance) a very unkind one for the hands which regularly need to adopt unusual and difficult positions to maintain contrapuntal flow and integrity. Indeed, this fugue has to stand as one of the most technically difficult and awkward fugues to perform from the entire ’48. It is my view that most players, having spent so long having to play it very slowly, eventually become mesmerised by this slow ‘practice’ speed into believing that such a tempo actually is appropriate! They seem somehow to have become conditioned by their endless slow performances and now seem happy to continue playing at this snail’s pace. And with pundits like Tovey egging them on who could blame them? I remain, however, surprised that most of them then fail to realise that instead of having made ‘a good beginning’ in their efforts to play this monumental piece, they instead seem to think that they have ‘completed the task’.  In some cases they leave recorded performances that still contain silly misreadings (showing that they have not even successfully accomplished their preliminary work). Although there are variant readings in the sources, none of these provides the kinds of silly errors of pitch often heard in poorly-prepared performances. Players seldom rise to the challenge of this phenomenally difficult movement.

The most serious problem is that they are never moved to think about the nature and character of the Subject. Presenting, as it does, an ‘upbeat’ quaver pattern consisting of three repeated D#s, we must conclude that this can hardly stand as a melodic gesture! It must, therefore, be alternatively  a rhythmic one (even though most performances – as notable particularly in Wanda’s performance above - make it sound like the introduction to a macabre funeral procession). As such its purpose serves to move the pulse forward on to beat 3? Following this opening, the Subject progresses through a series of syncopations (again a rhythmic device) which further assert the forward-moving nature of the Subject. It is, I believe, difficult to find any reason at all for assuming that the tempo should be anything less than a ‘normal’ 4/4 tempo – certainly not one so slow as to make a fugue of only 3 pages take 6 minutes to perform (as in the case of Wanda). It is indeed not at all impossible to play the piece effectively at a normal tempo (provided that the initial preparation has been careful and meticulous). The real problem is one of pacing, and creating a performance that accurately projects the structural and dynamic momentum of the movement, which is one that gathers structural pace as it proceeds, and one that increases in intensity as it reaches its conclusion. The final statement is approached by the use of block chords (again assertive rather than contemplative) and as it reaches its conclusion we hear, yet again, an uplifting move towards the inevitable haven of the tonic major chord as the climax is finally achieved. This hardly happens in most performances which – following the Tovey tradition – assume from the outset that this movement is slow and languid (rather than rhythmic and assertive).

If the tempo adopted were basically a ‘normal’ 4/4 one (similar, say, to that usually adopted for the C Minor Fugue in Book 1, and even offered also by Mr Grew in his recent electronic rendition of the G# Minor fugue from Book 1) the semiquaver figurations and scales might then carry the movement forward with a smoothly-flowing momentum. The rhythmic angularity of the Subject and Countersubject (both of which are developed motivically as the piece progresses) might then be bound together smoothly by these flowing semiquavers (rather like an egg that binds together all the bits and pieces of a burger!).

My own take on this piece is something like the following, which as will be clear projects a rather more rhythmic and dynamic character that is seldom found in recorded performances. It works best (I believe) if the semiquavers are absolutely smooth throughout (in contrast to the rhythmic angularity of the main themes) – but this is precisely what makes this 4-voice fugue, written in such a hopelessly nasty key, a challenge to the performer. If only some of them would rise to it!

CLICK HERE

Baz

I think this is something I hadn't properly considered.  Personally, I find the fugue theme to be really unpleasantly lopsided (which isn't compensated for by the fact that it fits so nicely with its initial counter-subject), and the harmonic content to me gets really stuffy after the first couple of bars; I almost feel slightly claustrophobic whenever I hear it.

I decided to stay clear of this wretchedly slow performance that you linked to.  I find the faster tempos to be entirely fitting.  Andras

There're probably some precedents in the bedroom, but in the concert-hall, and for this particular work, I couldn't say.

However, Sydney, the burning question for me is this: how the devil one goes about *dancing* to this fugue?



I can well understand your calls for a faster tempo, given that this is your goal, but even with that, I am unable to imagine exactly what bodily movements would best fit this piece.

"Whose" is certainly not Gustav - you will not find him bashing out a subject like this with 16' strings ablaze. Perhaps it might have been someone like George Malcolm?

Andras (whose performance provides a glaring misreading for the last RH note of bar 32) and Angela both adopt the speed and mood of a typical Alla breve movement (in which we are to imagine that the slow minims are divided into walking-pace crotchets). But Angela sulks at the end (as you say), and her performance peters out to an embarrassed silence. Andras hammers out the theme too much, and its contrapuntal ingenuity becomes lost. I particularly did NOT like the way he hammered out the inversion of the theme in the LH on the final line (hardly paying any regard to the RH rectus statement) - perhaps he was worried stiff that we might not have appreciated that it was actually there?

There are some misreadings (as opposed to 'variant readings') in Angela's performance as well.

This was rather tame, but accurate textually.


It takes me 3 minutes - how dare he manage it in 2.3?! That said, I basically like the approach (although it is a bit brutal at times). I enjoyed his inclusion of some of the 'variant readings', but did not enjoy the three clear misreadings! It was nice to be unable to hear any of his notorious vocalisations.


Glen (presumably 'Wilson'?) seems to imagine that this piece was intended for the harp rather than the harpsichord. Possibly his instrument is a little stiff, and he has decided that if everything sounds deliberately arpeggiated this may save him from the embarrassment of being heard unable to play everything together (at all!). I should have advised him to take it a little more quickly so that - hopefully - the injection of a sense of rhythm might have compensated for the stiffness of his instrument. I should also have advised him to acquire the services of a professional tuner so that the instrument was better attuned to a more realistic Equal Temperament. I won't even mention the few misreadings.


I decided upon hearing the initial statement of the Subject that I should not bother to listen to any more (so much did it misjudge the style and mood of all that was to follow). But in a spirit of fairness I relented, and heard him out. It got better as it went along, and we eventually realised that we were listening to counterpoint. But it takes a pecualiar mindset to step inside such a s-l-o-w and l-u-g-u-b-r-i-o-u-s performance. Perhaps this is what birds must feel when they are forced to interact with humans? I wonder whether he ever took lessons from Glenn because if you listen very carefully you can hear him vocally 'enriching' the counterpoint with various moans and groans. This is really poor behaviour!

But thanks to Mr Grew for sharing these with us - 'variety is the spice of life' is not it?

Baz

Sviatoslav Richter being tame? This I have to hear!

The more I hear it, the greater the affection the combination of the three repeated notes at the start of the theme with the corresponding four notes of the counter-subject in the first entry causes in me.

Thank you for those observations, Baz -- and certainly when the 29th century DOES come around, Bach will be sorely in need of revival.

I do wonder how one would play a fugue on the piano without privileging the theme. Do we know of any pianists so historically minded?

I really enjoy G Leonhardt's rendition of this fugue, by the way, even if it doesn't underscore the affinity with Beethoven's C minor symphony.

One approach to playing a fugue that appeals to me is to shape and articulate all the melodies as and when they occur, rather than place one of them in aggressive isolation apart from the others. Players often forget that lines of counterpoint are all individual melodies, and that it is through the melodic interplay of these strains (which are often of contrasting natures) that arise the harmony and the texture. (One of the numerous quaint observations made by Tovey was that 'Fugue is not a form, but a texture'.)

The difficulty in a performance that by default always makes the Subject a 'privileged' melody to be played louder than anything that may surround it is that instead of presenting a developing and transparent texture the presentation sounds instead like a repeating melody within a kind of 'mock-variation' form.

The Countersubject is structurally no less important than the Subject (even though it falls to the Subject to announce its presence first) and in very many cases it is/are the Countersubject/s that provide/s greater movement and melodic shape. One good example is the C# Minor fugue from WTC Book 1, but pianists will still by default hammer out its really quite uninteresting (on its own!) 4-note Subject every time it shows its increasingly-tedious appearance - just because this is what they always have done, and always will do with Subjects. It is interesting to note that this is also what Wanda then transplanted retrospectively back on to the harpsichord (!) - taking full advantage of all the pedals, knee levers, and other gizmos that modern harpsichord builders provided for the purpose. But it was never an approach either possible or desirable during the Baroque.

The piano with its playing technique has also brought about a serious misconception of the nature and role of dynamics: in Bach's day dynamics were 'terraced'. A 'forte' passage may be followed by a 'piano' one (sometimes merely as an echoing phrase, and sometimes as a structural contrast between one section and another). But these different dynamic levels were not yet bridged by the use of crescendo or diminuendo passages wherein one dynamic became transmogrified (or 'morphed') into the other! This is worth remembering when we listen to (say) Rosalyn's two climactic crescendi near the end of Mr Grew's example. This is not of course to imply that musicians (e.g. singers or string players) did not shape their melodies by the use of internal and intuitive changes in dynamic, but these were done at the local (individually melodic) level rather than globally.

Baz