Contrapunctus VIII – Jeffrey C. Hall

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Introduction
“Über dieser Fuge…”
Structure of The Art of Fugue
The “unfinished” fugue
About the realization
How to listen to The Art of Fugue
About the narratives

The Art of Fugue

Simple Fugues
Contrapunctus I
Contrapunctus II
Contrapunctus III
Contrapunctus IV

Canon alla Ottava

Stretto Fugues
Contrapunctus V
Contrapunctus VI
Contrapunctus VII

Canon alla Decima

Double and Triple Fugues
Contrapunctus VIII
Contrapunctus IX
Contrapunctus X
Contrapunctus XI

Canon alla Duodecima

Mirror Fugues
Contrapunctus XII + inversus
Contrapunctus XIII + inversus

Canon per Augmentationem

Quadruple Fugue
Contrapunctus XIV

Galaxies occur in clusters, and relative to their diameters, they are close together. For this reason, they frequently interact, and the sight of galaxies swinging by one another, colliding, and even consuming one another is a common one around the cosmos. Though they retain their essential “galaxyness,” their forms are often modified by the interaction — as is the case with the trio of highly distorted galaxies in the image above. Image credit: Hubble Space Telescope / NASA.

With Contrapunctus VIII, we begin a quartet of enormous fugues illustrating the technique of combining multiple subjects. All the fugues thus far have been based on variants of the main AOF theme presented at the start of Contrapunctus I. Now Bach begins introducing new subjects, and the results are spectacular.

Contrapunctus VIII is a triple fugue, employing three subjects. Here they are, in the order they appear.

The first two both trend downward and introduce a number of chromatic possibilities into the harmony. The third is a sturdy variant of the AOF subject. The second subject appears at 1:04, and the third at 2:32, and in keeping with the requirements of a triple fugue, all three subjects are combined simultaneously.

That technical assessment, however, hardly does this fugue justice. The development of the first two subjects is a somewhat lighthearted matter, but once the sharply contrasting third subject comes in, the music simply explodes with energy. It is an amazing display of panache, densely packed with the subject material and with dramatic, angular episodes and accompanying material.

This fugue is tightly linked with the fugue that concludes this quartet, Contrapunctus XI, in which Bach inverts all three of the present subjects to come up with a fugue with a completely different character.

This adds another link in the set of fugues that “point” to 11, an unmistakable example being the motivic material and chromatic countersubject in Contrapunctus III.