Tuesday with Another Voice

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Guest Columnist
Chuck Smythe

A musical conundrum in five voices

“Write what you know,” they tell us. Since retiring, many years ago, I have spent a lot of my time trying to know music. I hope to describe, here, my current battle to do justice to good music. I hope you’ll find it interesting, and I hope some of you will have insight to offer.

    As you’ll see, there aren’t necessarily right answers, but only more and less musical ones. I’ve been intrigued by recent research that shows that if you ask many people to solve a problem (crowd sourcing), the chance of getting a good answer is much greater that if you go it alone, or even ask a small and select group. Have fun with it!
    The music in question is the “Prelude and Fugue XXII, in B-flat Minor,” from book 1 of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier. You can listen to a typical performance on the piano here:



I am struggling to interpret the fugue in a way that answers, and completes, the prelude. I think that Bach usually intends that that be done in these pairings.

Let’s consider the fugue first. A fugue is the most complex sort of polyphony, which is music that, instead of a melody with accompaniment, has several voices or other instruments each playing its own melody, weaving in and out of the other melodies. You can think of a round as the simplest possible polyphony, with each voice singing the same melody, in the same key, delaying his start so that his melody overlaps the others.
    In the fugue (which is to the round as chess is to tic-tac-toe), this melody is replaced by a subject, a melody or fragment that is taken up by each voice in turn as the other voices weave in different material. You can hear the subject for our fugue in the first five notes of the piece; (tonic, lower dominant, rest, sixth-fifth-fourth), or in degrees of the scale (i v rest vi v iv). That rest is critical; the one landmark by which one can always hope to recognize the subject.
    In traditional fugal structure, the exposition has each voice take up the subject in turn. After that, other complicated things may happen: a second subject, the subject played upside down or backward or in a different key, different voices taking up the subject in unpredictable order—or the composer may forget about it and play with other material altogether for a while.
    Our fugue is relatively simple; one subject, short and sweet, always played right side up. On the other hand, there are five—!Count them!—5 voices! Most fugues use only two to four, and the fifth voice creates a dense, complex texture. The structural interest is that after the exposition the subject returns unpredictably, often popping out of the texture in such unexpected ways that Bach was certainly challenging the listener to find the subject. (E.g., about halfway through the alto voice chimes in in syncopation, in the middle of a complex bit of passage work.)
    About two-thirds of the way through, Bach writes a stretto, in which the voices overlap the subject like a round. Each voice starts on the rest of the previous one, so sorting them all out is difficult for the listener, almost impossible for the performer. In this instance, it is made more difficult as Bach changes the intervals and rhythms with each voice, then unexpectedly has two voices play the subject as a duet. Near the end there is another stretto, now with the intervals and rhythms as at the beginning, but so compressed that the whole thing is over in four bars.
    Finally, one last instance buried in the final cadence, with a reduced leap after the rest, ending in a Picardy third (that is, with the third degree of the scale raised by a half step so the piece ends in the parallel major; here, B major).
    The question with all this is, what effect did Bach have in mind? In a lesser composer, one might assume that it is merely an amusing technical exercise; where’s Waldo? And in most performances of it that I’ve heard, the fugue is played moderately fast, non-legato, with relatively little expression, the performer’s efforts spent trying to keep all those voices sorted out—I think! I find it hard to believe that this is what Bach had in mind, though. For one thing, he would never have done such a thing in his choral work. With no counter-example I can think of, the choral fugues are all tremendously expressive. For another, this fugue follows, and complements, that prelude, to which I now turn.

I first performed the prelude many years ago, long before I had any hope of managing the fugue. Most of the piece is underlaid with a pedal point—the tonic beating slow time over and over, deep in the bass, like a funeral march. The piece is also full of descending figures, da da daaaa, which Bach always uses as a “weeping” motif in his choral work. Third, it is full of transient, strong dissonances at critical points in the musical rhetoric, surely intended as cries of anguish. Therefore, I interpreted it as a song of sorrow, even perhaps a dirge, playing it rather slowly and as expressively as Baroque musical vocabulary can permit. Done thus, I finish the piece deeply moved, and desperately need the fugue to do something with all that anguish. But what? Certainly not to play a musical joke.
    I was puzzled to discover that many performances of the prelude do it as they do the fugue: moderately fast, non-legato, very little use of phrase shaping, agogic accents, and other expressive devices. What were they thinking? Many of these performers are famous artists, who surely had thought about it carefully. A guess is that they are confronted with a piece that was written for the harpsichord, an instrument with no sustaining pedal, for which legato and many other expressive devices were impossible.
    I was once told by a teacher that one must therefore never touch the pedal in Bach, and struggled with that for many years. It came to a head over the “Prelude in E-flat Minor,” whose texture features sequences of long, rolled chords which sound perfectly awful when played dry. When I listened to a harpsichord performance, I discovered that a note played on the instrument rings for a second or so, filling in the gaps between the chords—an effect utterly unlike the abrupt damping of an unpedaled piano note. At this point I admitted that a piano is not a harpsichord, and cannot be made to sound like one. A piano performance of Bach is a transcription to a different medium, and must first of all be played in a way that makes musical sense—though always within the context of Baroque performance practice, of course.
    A few famous pianists have done this. I knew Glen Gould’s version a decade before I heard any other, and he plays the prelude much as I did. Indeed he probably unduly influenced how I conceived the piece ever after. And the fugue? It starts slowly and thoughtfully, but builds to great climaxes in the strettos. The problem is, Gould is regarded by most musical scholars as eccentric at best, all too willing to sacrifice historical accuracy to his own musical sensibilities.
    A few other recordings have taken this approach—an old one by Edwin Fischer, for instance. But most of them—Kempff and Korevaar, for instance—resolutely avoid Romantic passion. Neither of these artists is known for an unemotional approach to other works. Kempff’s Beethoven, for instance, is full of fire. I should add, too, that his performance of our fugue is a technical tour de force. Each instance of the subject is meticulously voiced so the listener can find it. Furthermore, he does so without ever forcing the tone. Many other performances, e.g., mine, and even Gould’s, become very loud through the strettos as we struggle to bring out each voice, but Kempff manages it with a very gentle, musical tone. How did he do that? Just one of the many unreasonable technical demands of the piece....

So we are back to the beginning. Stipulating that I am going to do the prelude as a Soleá, what am I to do with the fugue? Thoughtful, philosophical resignation? Playfulness beyond sorrow? Recovery to triumph of the spirit? I ask for your ideas. There are, again, no right answers.
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Copyright © 2012 by Chuck Smythe
Chuck Smythe has lived in Colorado since the mid-60s. A retired astronomer, computer hack, and environmental extremist, he is spending his declining years on music and on such skiing and mountaineering as an old man can still manage.

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