fugue

fugue, in music, a compositional procedure characterized by the systematic imitation of a principal theme (called the subject) in simultaneously sounding melodic lines (counterpoint). The term fugue may also be used to describe a work or part of a work. In its mathematical intricacy, formality, symmetry, and variety, the fugue holds the interest of composers, performers, and listeners of Western art music in much the same way as the sonnet engages English-language poets and their readers.

History of the fugue

The earliest and most rigorous imitative technique in Western polyphony is the canon, in which each successive voice (the term for a musical line that is sung or played) has the same melody. Canons appeared in the 13th century and have been an important resource in Western counterpoint to the present day. (Folk music includes many examples of repeating canon, called round: “Frère Jacques” and “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” are familiar examples.) Fugue can be thought of as a later stage in the evolution of canon. The name fuga was applied to canonic pieces as early as the 14th century, but the logical ancestors of the fully developed fugue are the closely imitative beginnings of late 16th-century ensemble canzonas, such as those by Giovanni Gabrieli, as well as the related ricercare.

An early Baroque work for keyboard showing intense imitative development of a single subject is the Fantasia chromatica by Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, although much of this piece is dominated by fast-moving melodic counterpoint in a free, improvisatory style without the imitative subject. The Fiori musicali (1635; “Musical Flowers”) of Girolamo Frescobaldi include imitative cantus firmus pieces (i.e., based on a preexisting melody), as well as such substantial fugues as the Recercar dopo il Credo (“Ricercare After the Credo”) and Canzon post il comune (“Canzona After the Communion”).

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In the 17th century, such composers as Frescobaldi and Johann Jakob Froberger made use of fugal technique within the context of larger movements. The same technique was used at times by Johann Sebastian Bach, as in some of his keyboard preludes in Das wohltemperirte Clavier (1722, 1744; The Well-Tempered Clavier, two books, each comprising 24 paired preludes and fugues in all the major and minor keys); the E-flat Major Prelude in the first book, for example, freely intermixes strictly fugal and entirely nonfugal passages. By the time of Bach, the fugue as a complete composition, or as a named and self-contained section of a larger composition, had been well established in keyboard works by Dietrich Buxtehude, Johann Pachelbel, Georg Muffat, and many others in Germany, as well as in orchestral concerti by Antonio Vivaldi and others in Italy. The composer Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer’s Ariadne musica (1702), with preludes and fugues in pairs, in most of the possible keys, is a forerunner of Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier.

The works of Bach stand at the very pinnacle of the history of the fugue. Bach’s fugues remain unsurpassed in their extraordinary variety and in their individual perfection, and no other composer produced so many resplendent examples of fugues large and small for every medium available to him at the time. Hardly less impressive, though not as numerous, are the large-scale choral fugues in the oratorios of Bach’s contemporary, George Frideric Handel, as well as the fugues in concertante style in his concerti grossi. Yet by the middle of the 18th century, the fugue had passed its peak in popularity with composers; in the late 18th century, the fugue would survive chiefly in sacred music as a model of hallowed tradition. The symphonic era had begun, the period of Viennese Classicism, and the textures of the sonata and symphony developed in the direction of accompanied melody and chordal textures, generally leaving aside systematically maintained contrapuntal textures.

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The skill and imagination of Bach and Handel were nevertheless an inspiration to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart when he wrote the choral fugues in his Mass in C Minor, K 427 (1782), and Requiem, K 626 (1791). As a composer in instrumental forms, Mozart employed fugal technique only seldom but with conspicuous success, as in the Fugue in C Minor for two pianos, K 426 (1783), and the F Minor Fantasia for organ, K 608 (1791). The finale of Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 in C Major, K 551 (1788; Jupiter), a sonata-form movement with extensive passages of fugato in quintuple invertible counterpoint (see Elements of the fugue, below), is a unique tour de force in the history of music. Joseph Haydn employed the fugue several times in his masses and occasionally in his symphonies—such as Symphony No. 70 in D Major (first performed 1779)—and chamber music (for example, String Quartet in F Minor, Opus 20, No. 5 [1772]).

Ludwig van Beethoven brought the Classical symphony, piano sonata, and string quartet to a peak of lyrical and dramatic expression, but he also rediscovered the neglected fugue and virtually reinvented it. The second movement of his String Quartet in C Minor, Opus 18, No. 4 (1798–1800), begins with extensive fugato passages, and the treatment of the beginning of the slow movement of his Symphony No. 1 in C Major, Opus 21 (1799–1800), is quite similar. Even more extensive fugal treatment dominates the finale of the String Quartet in C Major, Opus 59, No. 3 (1806). Yet in his last works, Beethoven carried the fugue to new extremes, in the first movement and choral finale of the Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Opus 125 (1822–24); in the Mass in D Major, Opus 123 (1819–23; Missa solemnis); in the enormous finale of the Piano Sonata in B-flat Major, Opus 106 (1817–18; Hammerklavier); and in the Grosse Fuge in B-flat Major for string quartet, Opus 133 (1825–26; Great Fugue). In the Hammerklavier fugue Beethoven calls not only for multiple stretti (overlapping entrances; see below), melodic inversion (moving in the opposite direction; see below), and augmentation (lengthening note values) but also the seldom-used cancrizans (literally, “crablike”), in which the fugue subject is written backward, note for note. Here and in the Great Fugue, Beethoven divides the fugue into sections, with changes of key, metre, and tempo; the Great Fugue assembles a three-movement structure into a single movement about 25 minutes long, all controlled by a single fugue subject with several countersubjects.

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In Beethoven’s time the fugue became favoured as an instrument of pedagogy, especially in institutions such as the Paris Conservatory, where, beginning with Luigi Cherubini and continuing with Théodore Dubois and André Gédalge, a specialized and strictly regulated fugue d’école (“school fugue”) style was established that has continued to be taught into the 21st century.

After Beethoven, the fugue was favoured in the 19th century by composers who were influenced by the rediscovery of Bach’s masterworks. In the remarkable “Offertory” of Hector Berlioz’s Grande Messe des morts (1837; Requiem), the entire fugal treatment is in the orchestra, with a very long subject surmounted by a choral ostinato motive on just two notes. Organ works by Felix Mendelssohn, Franz Liszt, and César Franck, as well as Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B Minor (1851–53) and Faust Symphony (1857) and Franck’s Prelude, Chorale and Fugue for piano (1884), contain notable fugal passages. Johannes Brahms’s Variations and Fugue on a Theme by G.F. Handel (1861) is a worthwhile example, and his German Requiem (1857–68) includes a 37-measure fugue entirely on a tonic pedal point, as well as a brilliant double fugue. Giuseppe Verdi turned to the venerable technique for his Messa da Requiem (1874) and created a spectacular vocal fugue to end his last opera, Falstaff (1893), to the text “Tutto nel mondo è burla” (“The whole world is a joke”). At the turn of the 19th century and into the 20th, Gustav Mahler’s symphonies exhibited a conspicuous and impeccably skilled concern with orchestral counterpoint, but of his works only the finale of the Symphony No. 5 (1901–02) showed a genuine fugue exposition. Max Reger and Ferruccio Busoni continued the Bach-inspired tradition of fugue writing into 20th-century keyboard music of great complexity. The neoclassical movement in European and American music marked a reinvigoration of interest in fugue.