The Countersubject is structurally no less important than the Subject (even though it falls to the Subject to announce its presence first)
It's not just the subject's duty to announce its own presence, but it's duty to announce the presence of a whole melodic line. If one wishes to emphasise all the melodies, one surely first needs to emphasise presence of different melodic lines as and when they come in?
I don't think anything needs 'emphasising'.
I would personally think that would depend on the fugue.
It might be added to what you have said in your previous post that the very
simplicity of a subject means that it can be recognised quite easily however dense the texture might get and not drown out anything. That said, I have in my time rather enjoyed pounding out the subject to the a-minor fugue in book 2
One thing that I often find listening to a fugue is that I don't bother to distinguish the subject from the countersubject in my head: one is simply a continuation of the other, and both together form what I would think of as being the 'melody' of the fugue (sometimes when the character of the two is very different this becomes rather difficult though). Once stretti start featuring, is the distinction really, at an aural level, that crucial at all?
