The Art of the Fugue

After the dream of sentiment has been shattered and the intoxication of color has melted away, those under its spell will have clutched at the tatters and remnants of the festivity and plunged into the chaos of the exotic, in which there is no more gradation and no quality, while the more earnest types stand helpless among the overall deterioration. Yet many feel their way back to the treacherous crossroads, where the guardian spirit of fair travel abandoned them, and they remember a time when their thinking derived from the knowledge of all, when its form was configured from the momentum of all. The master was rarely named, but his image was carried through the streets in triumph. With the beginning of that period when art came to be commonly called “Romantic,” it became clear that there started to be a pathetic falsification of the relationship long thought to constitute the essence of art, namely the relationship between the artist and society. The artist no longer desired renown for his work but rather wanted that prize for himself. Alone, he ascended to heaven to steal the divine fire, not as a messenger but as a daring gift⁠-⁠bearer. And because he elevated himself over his fellow human beings in defiance, rather than with their blessing, he came to be ensnared by his isolation and ambition, and so the smoke of his fire was greater than its clarity. For, while he looked away from himself in a gesture performed for everyone else, a greater person moved among the community, not embracing the millions from the outside but instead binding them to him in their interior, as well as to the one whose name he also left us at the same time: corpus mysticum. Wherefore that senseless, absurd striving, when in loving strides our God unites our form—and when in a loving stride our God unites himself to our form, and, beyond our wishing, fulfills it from within?

In Gregorian chant, the collective consciousness of the medieval people was expressed in perfect form and accord. It is that pure monody that was cultivated by the schools of chant in their golden age, through the heavy, inaccessible beauty of their royal line, which includes that same aesthetic passion to which we also owe the monumental contours of the great frescoes. All this is handed down in the magnificent codices of their time, whose structure and style we misunderstand when we regard them as antiquated relics, and which we can scarcely appreciate in the living present in which they were written. The overtones (the octave, fifth, and fourth) were sung independently of the tonic note in the late period, but only to lend that one tone a new color and fullness, and all without surrendering the essence of the monophony.

The Dutch schools were the first to begin interpreting consistently this new state of affairs as a chord and intertwined its notes into those wonderful tapestries in which the voices move in independent harmony while also only making sense in their interrelations. Who could have wanted to tear this statue from its Gothic portal and deprive it of its connection with pedestal and pillar? Only the subservient simplicity of all the parts could raise the work to such a height.

But when the yearning for the beautiful form of the Greek figure awoke, the ordo of the ringing unity became a prison and a shackle. The voice wanted to become sovereign: hovering on its own, completely unconnected. The German masters brought this new style from the south, and a feud flared up between tradition and those southern European innovators. For, in the unfolded unity, the philosophers said, lay the whole world, and its mirror suffices to comprehend the universe. This liberated voice strode proudly through the history of music, followed and accompanied by the admiration of its counterparts. That accompaniment, however, became meaningless, dead matter without its leading voice.

But the struggle ended with victory for both. The period in which monadology was able to build a bridge between microcosm and macrocosm—not only so that the rare, blessed person was raised to the symbol of the whole, but so that each could find his place in the general harmony—this was the time that gave birth to the art of the fugue. For just as the monad is a person, holding within himself every point of space and time, and though without an outward⁠-⁠facing window is yet inwardly open, facing every other and inexorably yoked to the unbroken array of its essence, so in the fugue the voice is no longer submerged in the exclusively subservient position of harmony. Rather, it becomes invaluable as a part and mirror alike of the whole, harnessed to the order of the development and all the while itself affecting, commanding, and developing. And as it is the freedom of the monad to participate in the predetermined order of the best of all worlds, so it is the freedom of the voice to participate in the lawfulness of musical form.

This inner tension is the essence of the fugue, which, in The Art of the FugueBWV 1080., that last great work of Johann Sebastian Bach, blossomed into its complete, unfolded beauty. Bach’s art was perfection and therefore a finality. The great master was not only able to form the spiritual drama of the religious human being in his Passions and sacred cantatas—these are suffering and joy in divine suffering and divine joy—he was also able to raise the Christian idea of the ordo (of the community and of the consciousness of the person rightly in alignment within that ordo) up to its most clearly intelligible vision. This is the art of the fugue, in which Bach could therefore forego the ascending pathos of feeling, in contrast to his vocal works, which demand the resonance of the whole sensual human being. For as inconsequential as accompanying representations are for the condition of thought—they are at most either a support or an impulse—this vision is likewise inconsequential: to steal into the inner mathematics and harmonics of the community under the cover of a dubious enthusiasm. Only the calm of the purified mind will open up its laws. The urge to perform this work with romantic sentimentality would be mistaken. For Romanticism, with its cult of the personality, stands helpless before a work in which the person of the artist is surpassed. The theme of the work is not interesting in the Romantic sense: without light and color, and serious but not mournful, it passes through the nineteen fugues, always resonating with that transfiguration of religious humility—the same kind of humility that completely extinguished the master’s interest in the dissemination of his works. As often as they were preserved through blind chance, just as often an equal number were lost. With Bach’s death, an exceedingly strong hand released its grip. The voices broke the cage of fugal form and followed the clarion call to freedom from the ordo. In Mozart, the single voice in the form of the cantilena and the coloratura found its most ingenious expression. Beethoven had soon confessed that it was difficult for him to imbue a fugue with substance. The voice was dissociated from the conversation; its breath became shorter. Romanticism finds its most appropriate form of art in the “through⁠-⁠composed” song, until this too atrophies into a pale motif; but the accompaniment, inflated to an unnatural grandiloquence, invades these final dominants in proletarian fashion: Twilight of the Gods. What seemed to be a goal and a reward—emotion and feeling—became retribution. From the heights of the religious ordo we first become aware of the pure enjoyment of this fruit, which becomes poison for all who want to attain it from below. But for the just of mind everything is permitted. It was not presumptuousness when Bach, in the Triple Fugue in E⁠-⁠Flat Fugue in E⁠-⁠Flat Major, BWV 552 (“St. Anne”)., dared to portray the most enigmatic in the mirror and its image: the mystery of the three interpenetrating, flowing rings of Paradiso, the community of the Trinity. The freedom of the bound order is greater than the freedom of the lone voice.