Feature:

Beyond Modernism and Formalism 
in Performance and Recording 
of Bach's Art of the Fugue.

Bradley Brookshire

To coincide with the release of his CD of The Art of the Fugue, we are reposting Bradley Brookshire's article from Volume I, Issue #1 of  Modern Mask.

Most consideration of The Art of the Fugue has centered, naturally enough, on its identity as a work of counterpoint. Given its title (attached to the work after Bach’s death) and its organization—it is a large variation fugue, i.e. a set of fugues based upon variants of one fugal theme—it is hardly surprising that performers and critics alike have long given pride of place to the work’s structural foundations. As I have encountered The Art of the Fugue, however, it has gradually revealed a fundamentally different side to me. I have been ever more struck by its sensuality, its color, and its dramatic pacing, admittedly ephemeral aspects all, but ones that I believe were purposefully woven into the fabric of the work. Having seen this, I believe Bach’s purpose in writing The Art of the Fugue to have been necessarily much broader than that of offering merely a pedagogically-driven work of counterpoint, as correct as this limited notion might be. Instead, I believe it represents Bach’s attempt to assay and—where necessary—to reconcile the whole history of contrapuntal music and, in the process, to offer a vision of how counterpoint might have continued to thrive, even in the newest of stylistic contexts.

The problem of reconciliation was no small matter. On one side lay the Ars Perfecta, whose greatest representatives (the Renaissance masters Josquin, Ockeghem, and Busnois) arguably took as their central objective the creation of musical works that reflected the complexity, ingenuity, and beauty of God’s universe. This agenda took precedence over temporal aesthetic values such as comprehensibility. Whether or not humans could aurally grasp all their particulars was largely irrelevant, as Ars Perfecta pieces were directed to an omniscient God for whom even works of extreme complexity and ingenuity are, presumably, an open book. On the other side lay the Seconda Prattica, proposed by Claudio Monteverdi in the early 1600s as a new aesthetic purpose for music. This new practice of the art of music—which was never intended to replace the Ars Perfecta, but merely to augment it—embraced humanism, yielding music that was dynamic, colorful, varied, dramatic, and, in a direct about-face from the Ars Perfecta, chockablock with temporal models. Not only were human ears important, but also the previous purpose of music, to reflect God’s perfect universe, was partially jettisoned in favor of celebrating human life. Among such emulations of humanity found in The Art of the Fugue are dance prototypes, musical onomatopoeia (such as the Seufzer, a musical figure representing sighing), and that great musical symbol of pride and temporal power, the French Overture (exemplified by Contrapunctus VI). [Listen: Contrapunctus VI (counterfugue with diminution), performed by Bradley Brookshire.]

If the problem of reconciling these two views of music was difficult, projecting a future place for counterpoint in the emerging Classical style would be no easier; in fact, if judged by the majority of Classical-era pieces, the project failed altogether. The textures that early-18th-century Italian pioneers of the Classical style proposed must be considered emphatic repudiations of counterpoint. Nonetheless, during much of The Art of the Fugue, early Classicism seizes center stage, as in those moments that veer off into the appoggiatura-laden style of the mid-18th-century “Berlin school.” There the work’s style is hardly distinguishable—except for its contrapuntal bent—from that of either of the elder Bach sons, Wilhelm Friedemann or Carl Philipp Emanuel.

The Art of the Fugue is layered with other ironies and disappointments, as well. Bach died during the final stages of preparation of a new version of the piece. (He had finished an early version, complete in itself, around 1740.) The quadruple fugue, in which he introduces his own musically-encoded name as a subject (in the German musical alphabet B equals our B-flat and H is equivalent to our B-natural, allowing Bach to spell his last name in musical pitches), breaks off heartrendingly incomplete. And, despite Bach’s manifest interest in bringing edification and intellectual joy to those connoisseurs of music who might be adept enough to play the score at the harpsichord, the work has somewhat languished since the passing of that era in which many music lovers were also accomplished performers. For the passive listener without a score to follow—i.e., for the normal concert audience member—listening to The Art of the Fugue is a much less intense musical experience.

§

My passion for The Art of the Fugue runs somewhat counter to the proposition that it is a perfect exemplar of Augenmusik (i.e. music for the eyes, not well-served by performance). Performers have consistently and repeatedly repudiated the Augenmusik view—a product of the hagiographic mythology in which Germans, for the most part, entombed Bach in the early-20th century. Nonetheless, the sense of monumentality that so easily attaches to The Art of the Fugue has led to a Modernist novelty: a hands-off, "let-the-music-speak-for-itself" performance style in which the less one interprets this work, the more “responsible”—and putatively loftier, more Apollonian, and generally superior—the performance. Out of that recasting, a consensus of sorts seems to have emerged regarding the performer’s responsibilities apropos this great work. I might sum up that consensus in a few rhetorical questions. First, how might a performer fashion a rendition of The Art of the Fugue that is as well integrated as the work itself? Further, shouldn’t one show diligence and care by performing the movements in the correct order? In addition, given that this is a work of counterpoint, shouldn’t one adopt a style of performance that is as rigorous, severe, and controlled as the counterpoint itself? Finally—and this is a concern very often advanced by pianists and members of string quartets and brass ensembles—mustn’t the conscientious performer strive to render The Art of the Fugue in such a way that the themes are always prominent, clear, and more or less obvious?

As sincere as these concerns (all of which I have heard voiced by leading performers) may be, I have to admit that I find them founded on notions that are specious and misleading. The point about integration is heard often. But one might better ask: to what extent is any performance of The Art of the Fugue in danger of disintegration? Bach’s plan for a large-scale variation fugue is as thoroughly or even more thoroughly integrated than that of the other late contrapuntal works (The “Goldberg” Variations, the variations on “Vom Himmel hoch” and The Musical Offering), yet none of these works seems to arouse such hand-wringing over a sufficiently integral performance style. The forces of integration intrinsic to The Art of the Fugue seem, indeed, so strong as to make it instead a work that permits (I would even say demands) a relatively inventive, mercurial, and dynamic performance style. In my view, a performance of it that strives to reinforce its thorough integration only makes heavy weather of its most easily observed feature and does little, if anything, to enhance the piece.

Similarly, a great deal of ink has been spilled by Bach idealists recently over the question of the “correct” order of the various movements, a tendentious teleological discussion that has taken the inherent superiority of the later version of The Art of the Fugue for granted and set off in pursuit of the lost ideal version, an approach of the kind that one might have thought musicology had abandoned when many turned their backs on positivism. Further, performances and recordings that don’t adhere to reconstruction of the publication order are judged by Bach idealists to be necessarily inferior to those that do. The endeavor, premised as it is on the rigid reconstruction of a fragmentary icon in order to meet with the approval of long-dead arbiters, smacks of the kind of “Wellsian time-travel fantasy” that Richard Taruskin so creditably lampooned two decades ago.

The whole line of inquiry is unnecessary, for several strong reasons. For one, judging by the appearance of the manuscript sources, Bach seems to have been well pleased by both of the versions of The Art of the Fugue that he compiled, which vary substantially with respect to the order of the movements. But Bach idealists support the fassung letzter Hand (i.e., the notion that the last version of a work necessarily represents its most cogent expression and thereby detracts from the legitimacy of previous versions). The early version, they argue, was merely a larval early stage of The Art of the Fugue, in no way comparable to the majesty of the later version. If one prefers the later version to the one transmitted in the neatly-copied Berlin MS—as one might prefer the later version of the cadenza in the first movement of his Fifth “Brandenburg” Concerto—then that is all well and good. But to relegate the early version of either piece to the dustbin of scraps picked up from Bach’s workshop floor, declaring it a mere precursor to the later version, is to express open hostility to the possibility of what David Fuller amusingly calls “heterotextuality” in Bach’s oeuvre. Such hostility has a source that can be laid bare, however. Openness to the early version raises before Bach idealists the specter of two acceptable orderings of the work’s movements. Leaving room at the table for the early version lessens the strength of the true goal of the Bach idealists: the admonishment to play The Art of the Fugue in the “correct” order, as determined by the later version, on pain of discredit. In fact, the ordering of the early version is not inferior to the ordering of the later version. Its order corresponds perfectly to its contents, which are slightly different from those of the later version.

The search for the intended publication order of The Art of the Fugue is fine, of course, if the only aim is to publish it as Bach might have (although even that pursuit is quixotic, as Bach’s untimely death forever closed the possibly of recovering the work as he would have executed it, somewhat nullifying the purpose of the crusade). But going beyond the application of a reasonable order of movements to a proposed publication leads to murky waters. Drawing performance and recording imperatives out of the putative publication order of the later version is a dangerous and narrow-minded proposal. If the reordering of the later version seems to have reflected Bach’s wish to provide the planned publication a balanced and well-organized appearance that would take account of several newly-minted additions, especially if this wish were motivated by pedagogical experience, such concern does not necessarily indicate anything about how he wanted the piece performed, let alone how he might have felt about it in the context of a CD recording.

Indeed, there is a total dearth of evidence that Bach cared a whit about the cyclical performance of any of his works, or that he ever even countenanced such a possibility. If Bach had been as obsessed with strict adherence to the cyclical performance ideal as some have recently proved to be, he might have objected sternly to news of his student Johann Gottlieb Goldberg performing his variations piecemeal and out of sequence, as Goldberg manifestly did for his patron, Count Keyserlingk. But, of course, no record of any such disapproval comes down to us, for the simplest of reasons: the moral imperative behind strict cyclical performance of Bach’s works is wholly a Modernist fabrication. As such, it appears to have nothing to do with responsible performance (if indeed, however vehemently its hawkers might promote it, “responsible performance” is really a legitimate pursuit at all) or thought for the audience’s perception of the work.

If Bach found at least two ways, then, of presenting The Art of the Fugue, the second of which was motivated expressly by a change in the work’s contents, why ought we feel sheepish about responding to its fractured nature—a condition which Bach did not have the opportunity to deal with himself—with a limited, principled reordering of our own? We can't have the complete text of the later version of The Art of the Fugue. Instead, we have a collection in which a major piece (the fugue that is now generally accepted to have been planned as a fugue with four subjects, the last of which would have been the motto theme of the collection) exists only in a fragmentary state. A fragment is hardly something of which one easily makes sense in the middle of a work. Therefore the choice is between a putatively correct order which, to me, makes little dramaturgical sense and an ordering which has no Bachian pedigree but which perhaps makes greater significance of the fragment with which we have been left: i.e., obeisance to the fictional moral imperative of the cycle versus concern for perception by the present-day listener.

In pursuit of the teleological bridge to the lost ideal version, various artists have pronounced “Ça marche!” over the unfinished quadruple fugue, rejecting what might be considered the reasonable notion of re-ordering and offering instead their “reconstructions” of the fragment. The somewhat fearful premise behind these seems to be that, if reconstruction is not undertaken, then the purpose of the idealistic quest—already shaken by the “heterotextual” argument—is weakened further still. These much-ballyhooed “solutions” to the “problem” of The Art of the Fugue as received object seem on the order of the now-discredited completion of Beethoven’s Tenth or the Plaster-of-Paris arms that someone once slapped on the Venus de Milo. The ethics of completions—which played out so instructively in the late-20th century, when a broad array of musicologists and composers undertook various (and variously successful) completions of Mahler’s Tenth—makes three demands: that the completer approach the level of the conceiver in talent and training; that a sufficient amount is known about how the missing parts of a given fragment would have looked or behaved; and that the incomplete work be judged to be so disfigured in its fragmentary state that its aesthetic value is mostly lost. Suffice it to say that neither of the latter two conditions obtains in the case of the fugal fragment in The Art of the Fugue, a piece arrestingly beautiful in its incompletion, akin to Michelangelo’s Pietà. But it is no Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família. We lack the equivalent of a Gaudí blueprint, however much some might protest that they can offer acceptable substitutes for the missing element of Bach’s towering compositional capacity.

Obeying reasonable ethics regarding completions leaves us back at the question of the fragment’s “correct” position in the middle of an otherwise contiguous work. By removing it from its correct-but-incongruous place in the midst of the work, and by placing it, instead, at the end, we can at least make some metaphorical sense of its “fade to black.” Such reordering—though bitterly denounced by Bach idealists—is, on its face, less speculative than any completion could ever hope to be, as it is based on the whole history of the received work rather than on the death-banishing pseudo-restoration of a conception that, in reality, perished with its creator. Two world-views seem possible in this circumstance: The Art of the Fugue as prism through which to see the beauty of all of life’s inevitabilities, including death and loss; or The Art of the Fugue as anodyne lieto fine to the Humpty Dumpty story.  [Listen: Contrapunctus XIV (fragment of  quadruple fugue), performed by Bradley Brookshire.]

§

Continuing with the earlier-mentioned rhetorical questions, the notion that performance of contrapuntal music requires a severe performance style seems to me a particularly disfiguring misapprehension. To be sure, some logical limits have been placed on the performance of works of counterpoint: one might not be as free to ornament a work of counterpoint as liberally as it seems performers routinely did in non-contrapuntal music in the 17th and 18th centuries, for example. But the idea that one should proscribe tempo rubato (the subject of an extensive explication by C.P.E. Bach, who, by his own admission, was taught all that he knew about music by his father alone), or variety of articulation, or colorful registration (a specialty which J.S. Bach displayed proudly as one of his signature traits as a keyboard performer and for which he was widely celebrated, if such appreciation was often attended by some considerable astonishment), or the non-simultaneous performance of note values that are vertically aligned in the score, or a host of other liberties, is a viewpoint that seems to have coalesced with Bach’s revisionist hagiographers in the early 20th century. In other words, it is a concept totally lacking in any Baroque pedigree.

The overweening importance given to the clear rendition of fugal themes at all times is mostly put forth to justify performances of The Art of the Fugue on instruments other than the harpsichord. The supposition seems to be that the harpsichord, by dint of its relative inability to project fugal themes over the other voices, is a poor choice for contrapuntal music. But this view could be used to negate the performance on the harpsichord of The Well-Tempered Clavier and the Toccatas, as well as the gigue-fugues of the Partitas, the “French” Suites, and the “English” Suites. This would represent a bias that would be ridiculous on its face, being at odds with the historical record. The idea of projecting themes seems, in fact, a novel and unprecedented by-product of the concert hall, an environment in which performer and listener statuses are separate. When one performs fugues on the harpsichord for oneself, the themes—if the performer is the kind who is aware of them at all—are clearly in view, easily grasped, and never the sole focus. The performer/listener may then turn to a substantial beauty of contrapuntal music never given its due by the Modernist/Formalist Bach idealists: the natural, almost casual-sounding interaction of the melodic strands. The wish to reveal this beautiful discourse led me to the notion of performing The Art of the Fugue with a projected score in which the themes are color-coded, so that even a casual glance at the screen frees the listener from the onerous task of mentally pursuing the discrete contrapuntal threads. I have been giving live performances in this way since 2000.

Having looked at the imperatives that seem to have substantially formed recent recordings of The Art of the Fugue, I would replace the rhetorical questions mentioned earlier with alternatives that I think might be more positive. First, how might one render The Art of the Fugue in such a way as to bring into focus its most essential feature—i.e., the variety of styles and genres that Bach has pulled out of a small amount of thematic material? Surely, along with The Well-Tempered Clavier, The Art of the Fugue is Bach’s finest musical Wunderkabinette, his most superlative vade-mecum. Next, how might one present The Art of the Fugue such that it might be perceived not as performance piece in a particular order and thereby burdened with all the musty trappings of the museum culture, but instead as a hands-on, rough-and-tumble affair which invites circular exploration by the listener? Finally, how might one create the sense that the particular lines in the contrapuntal texture are being rendered by individuals in musical conversation with one another? This was the essence of Bach’s teaching—from his Aufrichtige Einleitung (the Inventions and Sinfonias) onward to The Well-Tempered Clavier, and culminating in The Art of the Fugue. Extremely difficult to achieve, it is success in this (which Bach termed “cantabile Art”)—rather than any Modernist/Formalist obsession over purity, integrity, or completeness—which seems the truest measure of any keyboard performer approaching The Art of the Fugue.