Sometime in the ninth century, medieval church musicians made a profound discovery: that a melody could be made more beautiful when sounded against another musical line. The result, which we call “counterpoint,” remained at the forefront of the Western tradition through the era of Johann Sebastian Bach, its greatest practitioner. Composers of Bach’s day employed distinct varieties of counterpoint in different kinds of pieces, reserving their most sophisticated techniques for keyboard and chamber works in the “fugal style,” meaning those works premised on imitative counterpoint in full harmonic flower. With this program we celebrate that repertoire with excerpts from key collections of Bach alongside some tuneful counterpoint from a good friend and colleague.

A quintessentially Bachian selection comes first: a prelude and fugue from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2. This volume, put together in the early 1740s, likely reflects a decade or more of compositional activity, as Bach created new pieces for his pupils to study and play. In festive music of this era, D major often meant trumpets and drums—echoes of which can be heard in Bach’s exuberant Prelude, with its declamatory opening gestures and nimble figuration. The Fugue, by contrast, is a proudly old-fashioned piece of counterpoint, with multiple overlapping entries (stretti) of a concise theme or “subject.”

One of Bach’s last works in the fugal style stems from his royal audience with Frederick the Great of Prussia in 1747. This epochal event at the Potsdam court—the quintessential juxtaposition of dour tradition with enlightened absolutism—featured a fugal improvisation by the venerable Leipzig cantor, on a complicated musical theme from the monarch’s own hand. Once returned home, Bach refined his improvised three-part fugue while composing afresh a monumental six-part ricercar, ten diverse canons, and a sumptuous trio sonata—all based on the royal theme. He then sent to the King this Musical Offering, as he called it, in a carefully inscribed presentation copy of the engraved edition, made at his own expense. Though we have no record of Frederick’s reaction to it, posterity has long regarded Bach’s extravagant gift as one of the summits of the late Baroque counterpoint. From this learned corpus our program excerpts several canons plus the trio sonata.

The Canon on the Royal Theme, the first to appear in the collection, situates Frederick’s melody in the middle of a three-part texture. Above and below it a regal countermelody appears at staggered entrances, in exact imitation (canon) at the octave. The “Crab” and the Canon for two violins, which appear at the head of a group of five “Diverse Canons” in the collection’s interior, are both premised on canon at the unison. In the former a longish melody that incorporates the royal theme is played against itself, with one voice proceeding normally while the other plays the same series of notes from back to front. (In realization, such a canon mimics the sideways skittering of a crab, hence its nickname.) The latter uses the royal theme as a sturdy bass, above which two violins spar in stylish two-part strict imitation. The Canonic Fugue, as its name suggests, is a canon with fugal aspirations. Over an independent bass line, two voices repeat the royal theme several times and on different scale degrees (in the manner of a fugue subject) while remaining in canon throughout. Just before the end, the royal theme migrates—out of the blue—to the bass for a final statement.

For his royal Sonata, Bach followed the conventional formal plan of the sonata da chiesa or “church sonata” for two treble instruments plus basso continuo. Like many such works from this era, Bach’s four-movement sequence comprises (in order) a sober Largo, a fugal Allegro, a languorous Andante, and a gigue-like concluding Allegro. All except the third movement incorporate Frederick’s theme in distinct ways, in fully invertible textures throughout—that is, with abundant exchange of material between voices.

The royal theme makes its most dramatic appearance in the second movement: after some forty bars and in the bass line, of all places, from which it eventually migrates to the other parts. More covertly, the opening movement’s throbbing continuo line alludes to its basic contours, while the closing movement accelerates it and changes its meter. The third, the only movement from which the royal theme is absent, subjects the “sentimental style” of the Berlin court musicians to sustained critique instead, in a tender yet nearly irrational jumble of swoops and sighs.

Bach began work on the Art of Fugue sometime around 1740 and continued to tinker with this ever-expanding corpus of fugues and canons until shortly before his death in July of 1750. The idea of such a collection—whose contents are likewise premised on a single, remarkably productive theme—seems to have been on his mind for many years. Though Bach’s deteriorating eyesight prevented him from seeing the original edition through to completion, his heirs ensured its publication. Engraved in open score, following the example of an earlier hand copy of the work, the Art of Fugue was surely intended to serve keyboard players principally, though it may be performed by any instrument(s) capable of realizing its densely intertwined musical lines.

As first published in 1751, this grand compendium of the fugal art includes fourteen fugues—each entitled contrapunctus, effectively a learned badge of honor—and four canons, plus alternative versions of various movements. Like no other collection before or since, this volume explores systematically the various subgenres of fugue and canon, in groups of pieces that grow steadily more complex and thus more challenging for the player. This program offers two of its “simple fugues” that explore the imitative possibilities of the main theme on its own: right-side-up in Contrapunctus 1 and inverted melodically in Contrapunctus 3. Two “compound fugues” demonstrate how well the parent melody combines with additional subjects: Contrapuntus 8 has three themes, while Contrapunctus 9 has two. The Canon at the Octave and the Canon at the Twelfth, finally, are both composite works, each of which is premised on a variant of the main theme in strict imitation while also incorporating either melodic or contrapuntal inversion (voice exchange) of their respective thematic material.

With his eighteen Canons mélodieux, published in a single volume in Paris in 1738, Georg Philipp Telemann showed that even the most restrictive kind of musical procedure can be as gracious as dance music or song. These tuneful little wonders may be realized on virtually any instruments; their compact presentation on a single staff means that performers can even share a single copy of the score. Organized as three-movement sonatas, these works combine artifice with toe-tapping pleasure. For the individual movements of Sonata VI, Telemann borrowed familiar Baroque dance rhythms: an opening A-minor Vivace in the style of a bourrée leads to a sweet-sounding siciliano (marked “Soave”) in B-flat major, while the final Allegro alternates playfully between A minor and A major, in the style of a passepied.

Telemann’s Fantasies for unaccompanied violin demonstrate his more serious side. Such pieces require the player to project (through double and triple stops) a texture of multiple independent lines, as in a chamber sonata or a fugue. Like Bach’s better-known sonatas and partitas for unaccompanied violin or cello, Telemann’s Fantasies are multi-movement affairs that combine Italianate melodiousness and German counterpoint. The initial Adagio and Presto of the F-minor Fantasie are its most rigorous movements, while the final two are joined at the hip, with the brief Grave yielding quickly to a lilting Vivace.

© Matthew Dirst