If the high proportion of binary preludes is the most notable surface feature of Book II, pointing to the influence of the sonata, it is less remarkable in itself than as a symptom of a radical new integration of elements. We have noted the move from binary dance to binary sonata in the works of Corelli, a process which was to reach completion in the 1720s. Corelli used two very influential principles. One was to link a number of different, not necessarily related, ideas together in a moto perpetuo of a single predominant note value, best seen in the Allegro second movements of his Op.5 violin sonatas. This principle was at work, linking disparate ideas together, in the B flat major prelude of Book I. The other principle, described by Georg Muffat (1701) as the main reason for Corelli’s vogue, is the combination of the gracefulness of French dance metre with the brilliance of the Italian concerto style in a concertante treatment of dance genres. Bach used this type of dance with concertante elements in, for example, the smaller dances (minuets, gavottes etc.) of his unaccompanied string music and in the orchestral overtures. Around 1720 Bach was using a sonata structure based on the aria ritornello, as in the allemandes and courantes of the cello suites. From the later 1720s this structure continued to be used, but with much greater character contrast between elements, as can be seen, for example, in Telemann’s Fantasias for harpsichord (Hamburg 1733). This is all part of the move from the binary dance, where the genre is the character of the piece, to the character piece proper. At the same
time the Corellian type with a succession of different ideas became more highly characterised, a process which may be seen in the violin teacher–pupil line Corelli–Somis–Leclair. The keyboard equivalent is in the sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti, which run a number of highly characterised ideas, often involving strong contrasts and surprises, from tonic to dominant in the first strain, and the same series with extensions and developments back to the tonic in the second strain. This is the common model, which Scarlatti treated with infinite originality. One way of avoiding predictability is to shuffle the order of ideas in the second strain. Nearer to Bach, this model was worked in a very different style, but with equal originality, by C.P.E. Bach in the Prussian and Württemberg sonatas (1742, 1744).
The nearest Bach comes to this new type of sonata in Book II is in the B flat major prelude, with a series of no less than seven related ideas in the first strain, which are then shuffled into a different pattern in the second. The sonata principles of a succession of different ideas and of contrast were taken on by Bach and worked into his existing formal principles in very fruitful ways. One is the way in which it affected the invention type. In the 1723 Inventions the material is highly unified, everything developing from the opening. In the preludes in D sharp minor, E minor and B minor of Book II Bach incorpo- rates the sonata principle of successive ideas into this by combining his initial
inventio with a series of new counterpoints at each appearance during the first
strain. These may then be treated as a series of sonata character ideas, and the series be re-run from dominant back to tonic after the double bar. Bach’s mind is remorselessly integrative, and in this case all the ideas are linked by being counterpoints to the same initial theme. Another type of prelude takes the principle of contrast and presents two clearly contrasted character ideas at the opening, as in the D major and F minor preludes. But rather than moving on to further contrasting ideas, Bach spends the rest of the piece integrating them in various ways, and demonstrating their fundamental relationship. These two preludes are very obvious examples of this. The principle of two contrasting ideas at the opening is nonetheless present in a more subtle guise in the preludes in F sharp major, A flat major, G sharp minor and B major, where the argument of the piece is worked out on his favourite structural principle of successive re-runnings of the aria ritornello shape in a non-binary context.
In this new sonata-influenced manner, the subdominant reprise noted as a standard in Book I now survives only in older pieces worked up for Book II such as the C major prelude. More common now in the large preludes of the late 1730s is a tonic reprise (as in the preludes in D major, E flat major, F major, F sharp major and minor, and G sharp minor). Too much should not be made of this as pointing towards the Viennese Classical sonata form: C.P.E. Bach was a far greater influence there. The preludes lack the crucial Classical element of tonal duality reconciled in the reprise. But the fact that the final section must
stay in the tonic rather than modulate to another key means that Bach cannot simply transpose his initial section but must recast it to stay in the tonic, an opportunity for further moulding and development of material in which Bach excelled as much as the Viennese masters.
In all this Bach is combining new elements with principles he had developed in the Inventions and Book I. The combination of old and new, of updating the tradition, is a fundamental objective of both books. The desire to do this was if anything more acute in the 1730s since he was coming under fire for being outmoded. Clavier-Übung III (1739) has some of his most remarkable combinations of old and new, and Mizler’s announcement of its publication makes it look as if at least part of Bach’s aim was to refute his critics (Dok.II p.387, NBR p.333). But the objective was a constant one with him and he would have continued it anyway.
If compositional elements combine old and new, Bach shows an interest too in practical matters such as keyboard technique and figurations. Devices which Rameau had described in his harpsichord Method of 1724 appear in the reversed-hand technique in the new ending of the C major fugue, and the little
batterie with one hand enclosing the other which is the second of the two
contrasting ideas at the beginning of the F minor prelude. There is also some modest hand-crossing in the B flat major prelude.19 These are very tame compared with the technical explorations of the Goldberg Variations. But old and new are combined with great sophistication in less obvious ways. The B major prelude has a ‘modern’ scale of B, pivoted over the thumb, contrasted with the old seventeenth-century roulade technique of dividing scales between the hands. The B major also has a kind of Alberti broken-chord pattern, shared with the preludes in D sharp minor and F sharp minor. This can be nothing to do with Domenico Alberti (c.1710–40) since the pattern did not become at all common in Italian keyboard music before the 1750s (Freeman 1994 pp.236–7). Bach would in any case probably have found the effect crude, like the Murky bass, and the idea of writing many notes to little purpose is unlikely to have appealed to him. The pattern in itself is not hard to find in German keyboard sources of around 1700. The Intonatio primi toni of Murschhauser’s
Prototypon (Nuremberg 1703) could have been written to demonstrate how it
evolved from standard seventeenth-century keyboard patterns, and more nearly in Bach’s area it appears in works of Nikolaus Vetter in the Mylau tablature. The origin of the pattern in Bach’s own work is not far to seek since it occurs in his concerto arrangements of around 1713, notably in the organ arrangement of Vivaldi’s Op.3 No.8 BWV 593 where it literally reproduces a violin figuration. Bach’s patterns of this sort are best seen as concerto-type figurations deriving ultimately from the violin, and designed to provide a lively texture to passages of harmonic movement from one key centre to another. Bach’s interest in concerto effects seems to have revived in the 1730s when he
Book II – Newer types 71
was arranging harpsichord concertos for the Collegium Musicum, and concerto figurations crop up in keyboard works such as the so-called ‘Wedge’ fugue for organ BWV 548/2 and the last movement of the D major gamba Sonata BWV 1028.
Making the concerto arrangements at Weimar must have introduced Bach to the fascination of alluding to one medium in terms of another, something he worked out powerfully in the unaccompanied violin music, and which is one of the things Book II seems designed to demonstrate. The fascination lies in the fact that in some ways the evocation is more powerful than the real thing. Imitating new orchestral sonorities was a feature of harpsichord writing in the 1730s and 1740s, in the sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti and such works as the second Livre of Jacques Duphly (Paris 1748), and Bach provides an example in the D major prelude. Other evocations are of the organ praeludium (C major), the Lautenwerk (E flat major), and various instrumental trios (C sharp minor, A major, B flat minor). The G sharp minor prelude oscillates between the manners of keyboard sonata, invention, and violin sonata. In addition to this Book II is remarkable for some entirely novel keyboard textures and effects, such as in the preludes in F major (whose highly original texture probably derives ultimately from a type of French organ prelude), F sharp major and A flat major.
1. Definition
There are many modern misconceptions about the nature of fugue as practised by Bach, and many definitions have been attempted. Most of these suffer from being at once too precise and too vague. Vaughan Williams, for example, in an otherwise sympathetic article in the 5th edition of Grove’s Dictionary (1954, ‘Fugue’) defines it as ‘A musical movement in which a definite number of parts or voices combine in starting and developing a single theme, the interest being cumulative’. This is a perfectly good general definition for a concept of fugue which developed after Bach’s time, represented most typically in the Cours de
contrepoint et de fugue put together by J.F. Halévy from Cherubini’s instruction
(c.1837; English translation 1838). Cherubini quite rightly says that the fugue offers excellent opportunities for practising many techniques of composition in a tonal framework (1838 p.286), and it was for this training purpose that the theory of the nineteenth-century academic fugue was evolved. Its fruitfulness as a means for understanding Bach’s concept of fugue is limited, but the irony is that it was Bach’s fugues, and the prestige they acquired in Berlin, Vienna and Paris in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which gave the impetus to the development of this theory. The process of codification of ‘rules’ based on Bach’s practice, and consequent ossification of the genre, began immediately after his death with Marpurg’s Abhandlung von der Fuge of 1753–4, the forebear of subsequent academic treatises.
Since the essence of fugue is so difficult to pin down, Vaughan Williams was careful not to say too much. Even so, neither of the two points he makes hold good for the late Baroque keyboard fugue. Fugues with a background in keyboard improvisation, such as some of Handel’s or the fugue-type sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti, cannot be said to be in a set number of parts, nor can some pieces entitled Fugue in French Baroque organ repertory. A number of fugues in the 48 increase the number of parts towards the end, and this is so even in
Bach’s strictest work, The Art of Fugue. Cherubini considered that a fugue could properly be said to have only one subject, any subsequent themes intro- duced being countersubjects (pp.302–3). This was certainly not the way of looking at it in Bach’s time and earlier, where designations such as ‘a due
soggetti’, ‘a tre soggetti’ and so on were common. The notion that the first voice
enters unaccompanied, supposedly the reason why the three-part Sinfonias were not called fugues, is plainly not true of many of Bach’s choral or instru- mental fugues.
This very difficulty of definition results from the complexity of the tradition as it had developed by the early eighteenth century, with the term fugue meaning a number of different, sometimes conflicting, things. In order to appreciate Bach’s achievement it is more fruitful to look at the concepts and materials of the tradition in which he operated, and to see with what enterprise and originality he built on them, than to approach his works as a closed and normative corpus that defines all the available options. Had he lived longer he would no doubt have written further fugal works which would then have to be taken into account in this definition. The extent and quality of his achievement can be assessed only in the light of his context.