A fugue is a wondrous thing!
I met my first fugue when I was a freshman in college,
and it was love at first sight. The
nearly endless kaleidoscope of permutations fascinated me: fugue subjects overlapping
here, there and everywhere, sometimes submerged but seldom absent, tossed from
voice to voice and key to key like a ball in a delightful game. Something inside of me stirred, woke up and
said, “Wow!”
Fugues have fed my imagination ever since, and deepened
my appreciation for the imagination of the composers who created them. But how do they stimulate the imagination? Isn’t it all just mechanics? They don’t really create pictures in the
mind, do they? Or do they?
I found a captivating video on YouTube that may serve as
a starting point. It turns the musical
notation into a kind of graphic of the intertwining musical ideas in Lobet den
Herrn, the Bach motet that Master Chorus Eastside is singing at our
March 10 concert.
The sopranos (yellow dots) enter with the main musical
idea, called the fugue subject, answered by the altos (red), then the tenors
(green), then the basses (blue). Notice
the shape of the subject line; it starts very low in the singer’s ranges, then
shoots skyward before heading back down.
The text here translates as “Praise the Lord, all nations;” perhaps the subject
begins on earth, where we reside, then points us upward toward God?
The voices indulge in a dialogue for a bit, tossing the
subject first to the basses, then to the tenors, then to the sopranos before
everyone joins in again. But wait, at
1:20, something surprising happens; the sopranos begin a new fugue subject on
the text, “And praise him, all people.”
The shape of this one is different; it starts high, trips lightly
downhill, then surges heavenward again.
Is it maybe sweeping up “all people” as it descends before carrying them
again toward heaven? Notice how the
musical conversation unfolds at 1:47, and then watch (and hear) how it changes at
1:56. Can you perhaps hear the hubbub of
voices lifted in praise?
And then at 2:20 something marvelous happens. The first “Lobet” subject sneaks into the
tenor part, and Bach combines both fugue subjects! This strikes me as fitting, since there are
no nations without people!
The music is transformed at 3:07: long notes, graceful
lines, vocal imitation and dialogue that is sort of fugal; it all could be
interpreted as a characterization of God’s grace (Gnade) and truth (Wahrheit)
as he shows us mercy (waltet). Notice how Bach musically underscores those
words throughout this section. Then at
about 4:15 the word Ewigkeit (eternity)
appears, and Bach’s depiction of this word is charmingly evident in the
stretched out dots!
At 5:33 we are back in fugue territory again with “alleluia.” The fugue subject exuberantly dances all over
the place as the voices trade alleluias back and forth, a vibrant image of joy. Trace the shape of the lines; at about 6:30
Bach turns the subject upside down in the yellow dots, maybe a kind of joyful musical
cartwheel?
In the end it’s impossible to say how fugues stimulate
the imagination. Perhaps a better
question to ask is what does it communicate to you? There lies the path to imagination, for that
communication will depend on what each of us brings to the piece on any given day. My interpretations above are not meant to
be comprehensive, or even “the right answer.”
Certainly in Baroque music, especially in that of Bach, the music
serves the text. We can’t ignore that. But that’s a starting point for your own
imaginative journey. You
will no doubt find your own interpretation.
So go to it!
Dr. Linda Gingrich
Artistic Director and Conductor
Master Chorus Eastside
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