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Time and the Keyboard FugueAuthor(s): Keith ChapinSource: 19th-Century Music, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Fall 2010), pp. 186-207Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/ncm.2010.34.2.186 .

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19th-Century Music, vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 186–207. ISSN: 0148-2076, electronic ISSN 1533-8606. © 2010 by the Regents ofthe University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article

content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions Web site, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ncm.2010.34.2.186.

Time and the Keyboard Fugue

noting the “finer smelting” of the melody,Schumann did not say much about the slightdifferences in technique that distinguished Bachfrom Mendelssohn, but the significance hefound in the technical differences is both strik-ing and illuminating. Schumann saw “moderntimes” reflected in Mendelssohn’s fugues.

Although he spoke primarily as a technicianof the fugue when observing Mendelssohn’smodern touches and handling of melody,Schumann had more than updates in composi-tional technique in mind. A year later, he woulddescribe Bach’s fugues as “character pieces ofthe highest art” in a review of Carl Czerny’sedition of the Well-Tempered Clavier.2 Schu-

KEITH CHAPIN

In an 1837 review of Felix Mendelssohn’s Pre-ludes and Fugues, op. 35, Robert Schumanncalled his readers’ attention to slight but sig-nificant differences in fugal technique: “In aword, these fugues have much of Sebastian inthem and might make the most sharp-sightedreviewer err, were it not for the melody, thefiner smelting in which one recognizes moderntimes, and here and there those little touchespeculiar to Mendelssohn that betray him as thecomposer among a hundred others.”1 Beyond

1“Mit einem Worte, die Fugen haben viel Sebastianschesund könnten den scharfsichtigsten Redacteur irre machen,wär’ es nicht der Gesang, der feinere Schmelz, woran mandie moderne Zeit herauserkännte, und hier und da jenekleinen, Mendelssohn eigenthümlichen Striche, die ihnunter Hunderten als Componisten verrathen.” Robert Schu-mann, Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker, 4vols. (Leipzig: Georg Wigand, 1854), I, 100. All translationsare my own unless otherwise noted. I have provided theoriginal text of quotations from primary sources, but notfor those of secondary literature. This article builds on apaper presented at the 2008 annual meeting of the Ameri-

can Musicological Society, at the Université François-Rabelais Tours, and at the Schweizerische musikforschendeGesellschaft in Basel. I thank Lawrence Kramer and DanielMelamed in particular for their criticisms of the paper.2Schumann, Schriften, III, 5. The review (1838) is appendedto a discussion of Czerny’s Schule des Fugenspiels unddes Vortrags mehrstimmiger Sätze.



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KEITHCHAPINTime and theKeyboardFugue

mann was not a critic to restrict himself totechnical considerations. The modern times herecognized in Mendelssohn’s fugues were asmuch a matter of mood as they were matters oftheme construction, phrasing, or cadence. Af-ter all, to speak of the fine smelting (feinerSchmelz) of the melody is to use a metaphor tocapture the affective character or mood of themelody and by extension of the whole. Thefugues, in other words, produced a mood thathad much of Sebastian in it but was also mod-ern and suitable to the nineteenth century. Be-hind this mood, as behind Mendelssohn’s tech-nique of fugue itself, stood a negotiation of pastand present, a synthesis of a dual obligation toa tradition posited as timeless and to a prin-ciple of historical change that rendered thepresent different from the past.3

Moreover, the mood of modern times wasnot just the product of Mendelssohn’s compo-sitional prowess. Moods exist in people, ulti-mately, even if they can be provoked by musicand other phenomena and thus be attributed tothem. As David Wellbery has noted, all theo-rists of mood (Stimmung) have attributed to ita strong quality of the I (Ichqualität).4 In thissense, Schumann’s statement about Mendels-sohn’s fugues says as much about Schumann asit does about Mendelssohn or Bach. The moodhe heard emerged not just from technical char-acteristics but also from an interpretive prac-tice. It was due in part to the way that thefugue manipulates harmony, melody, rhythm,themes, and other technical characteristics, butit also owed much to the way that Schumannlistened to and thought about the fugue.

In short, the modernity of Mendelssohn’sfugues was equally a matter of Mendelssohn’stechnique and of Schumann’s interpretive prac-

tice. Both were of their time. Yet they were notjust of their time. The technique of fugue andthe practice of interpretation also worked intime in a way characteristic of their age. Be-hind Schumann’s aperçu stands a questionabout how the fugue articulates time and howtime works in the interpretive process. Forthrough its characteristic articulation of time,the fugue creates a characteristic sound andmood; and through different types of interpre-tation, the critic will hear the temporal charac-ter of the fugue in different ways.

These issues are particularly interesting be-cause the fugue has often stood as a token ofdurability, of timelessness, as have its affili-ates, canon and the stile antico. The homagethat Schumann and Mendelssohn paid to Bach’sfugues is itself an indication of the transhis-torical value that they attributed to the genre,but the critical topos linking the fugue andassociated genres and styles with timelessnesshas a long and multiform history. In 1721Heinrich Bokemeyer wrote of the canon, “therehe [the artist] finds the beginning and end boundtogether and has discovered the perpetual canonin order to remind himself of the eternal un-ending origins as well as the harmony of alleternity, a rule of nature of the most perfectexample of his artistic work.”5 In the circular-ity of canon, Bokemeyer found an allegory ofthe circularity and harmony of eternity. Al-most exactly one hundred years later, in 1819,Christian Friedrich Michaelis explained the sub-lime sentiment elicited by canonic and fugallyelaborated works as “based on the manner inwhich the imagination, striving to comprehendthe melody, is held up by the entrances of newvoices and, despite the imagination’s inclina-tion toward variety and change, is always ledback to the one and the similar. By this, reasonfinds itself stimulated to think of the lasting

5“Da findet er nun den Anfang und Ende verknüpffet, undhat den Canonem infinitem, um sich des ewigen undunendlichen Ursprungs, wie auch der in alle Ewigkeitbestehenden Harmonie, zu erinnern, als eine Regul derNatur, zum vollkommensten Muster aller seiner Kunst-Arbeit.” Cited in Johann Mattheson, Critica Musica, 2vols. (Hamburg: Author, 1722–25; facs., Laaber: Laaber,2003), I, 342–43.

3On Schumann’s view of history, see Carl Dahlhaus,“Klassizität, Romantik, Modernität: Zur Philosophie derMusikgeschichte im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Die Ausbreitungdes Historismus über die Musik, ed. Walter Wiora, Studienzur Musikgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Regensburg:Gustav Bosse, 1969), pp. 261–76; Bernhard Meissner,Geschichtsrezeption als Schaffenskorrelat: Studien zumMusikgeschichtsbild Robert Schumanns (Bern: Francke,1985).4David Wellbery, “Stimmung,” in Ästhetische Grund-begriffe: Historisches Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden, ed.Karlheinz Barck (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000–05), V, 704.



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and the eternal.”6 The thematic unity of thefugue and the canon became a symbol underthe aspect of the eternal.

The aura of immutability permeated otheraspects of musical practice associated withcounterpoint and the fugue as well. FriedrichRochlitz, the founding editor of the Allgemeinemusikalische Zeitung, argued that a solid train-ing in fugue would assure the durability ofworks over time and thus assure their compos-ers of immortality. Like other pedagogues bothbefore and after him, Rochlitz located the toposof timelessness not just in the fugue as a genrebut also in the compositional craft it taught.The logic involved was different. It owed some-thing to musicians’ desires to protect treasuredtechniques against changes in style.7 But theassociations were similar.

Behind Schumann’s offhand comment onmodern times, then, stands a host of issuesgoverning the relationship between time andthe keyboard fugue.8 The fugues articulate time

through their compositional techniques andthereby create works of a certain character ormood. This character or mood can have a tem-poral dimension, seeming either to cyclethrough a lasting moment or to develop teleo-logically toward a goal.9 Furthermore, both thecompositional techniques and the character ormood can be timely; they can use up-to-datecompositional techniques and can capture thesensibility of the time. Finally, the fugue cansymbolize various ideas of time held at bay—oftranscendence.

In this article, I will investigate one funda-mental shift in the relationship between thekeyboard fugue and time. While the shift mani-fested itself in both compositional and criticalpractices, it is at root a shift in the approach totime that occurred over the course of the eigh-teenth and early nineteenth centuries. The his-torian Reinhard Koselleck has distinguishedbetween cyclical and linear views of time—events seem either to repeat each other or todiffer—and he has noted that the privilegedconception of time changed from the cyclicalto the linear over the course of the eighteenthcentury.10 Karol Berger has recently argued thatJohann Sebastian Bach’s fugues suggest cycli-cal time. They mirror the repetition of histori-cal events within an essentially static divineplan.11 David Yearsley has catalogued and ana-lyzed the fascination with allegory amongBach’s contemporaries.12 The compositional and

6“Diess gründet sich auf die Art, wie in solchenCompositionen die nach Umfassung der Melodie strebendeEinbildungskraft durch neu eintretende Stimmenaufgehalten, und bey ihrer Neigung zu Mannigfaltigkeitund (Veränderung) immer auf das Eine und Ähnlichezurückgeführt wird, wodurch die Vernunft sich aufgeregtfindet, das Bleibende und Ewige zu denken.” ChristianFriedrich Michaelis, “Etwas zur Rechtfertigung desContrapunctes,” in Michaelis, Ueber den Geist derTonkunst und andere Schriften, ed. Lothar Schmidt,Musikästhetische Schriften nach Kant (Chemnitz: GudrunSchröder, 1997), p. 291.7Friedrich Rochlitz, “Die Fuge: Zunächst an Dilettantenund Laien,” in Für Freunde der Tonkunst, 4 vols. (Leipzig:Carl Cnobloch, 1824–32), I, 141–77. For other examples oftraditionalist polemics against the new, see Johann JosephFux, The Study of Counterpoint: From Johann Joseph Fux’sGradus ad Parnassum [1725], trans. Alfred Mann, rev. edn.(New York: Norton, 1971); Heinrich Schenker, Kontra-punkt, 2 vols. (Vienna: Universal, 1910–22); PaulHindemith, “Sterbende Gewässer [1963],” in Aufsätze,Vorträge, Reden, ed. Giselher Schubert (Zurich: Atlantis,1994), pp. 314–36.8Edward Lippman, “Progressive Temporality in Music,”Journal of Musicology 3 (1984), 121–41; ReinholdBrinkmann, “In the Time(s) of the ‘Eroica’,” trans. IreneZedlacher, in Beethoven and His World, ed. Scott Burnhamand Michael P. Steinberg (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 2000), pp. 1–26; Keith Chapin, “Strict and Free Re-versed: The Law of Counterpoint in Koch’s MusikalischesLexikon and Mozart’s Zauberflöte,” Eighteenth-CenturyMusic 3 (2006), 102–04; Melanie Wald, “Moment Musical:Die wahrnehmbarkeit der Zeit durch Musik,” Dasachtzehnte Jahrhundert 30 (2006), 207–20; Karol Berger,Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay on the Origins ofMusical Modernity (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 2007); John Butt, Bach’s Dialogue with Modernity:Perspectives on the Passions (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 2010). For a nuanced discussion of Bach’srelationship to modernity, see Butt, Bach’s Dialogue, pp.36–96.9For a succinct discussion of cyclical and linear temporalmodes, as well as their combined form (the spiral), seeSimone Mahrenholz, “Zeit: Musikästhetische Aspekte,”in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart: AllgemeineEnzyklopädie der Musik, 2nd edn., ed. Ludwig Finscher(Kassel: Bärenreiter and Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994–2008),Sachteil IX, cols. 2231–45.10Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantikgeschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,1979).11Berger, Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow, pp. 89–129.12David Yearsley, “Alchemy and Counterpoint in an Ageof Reason,” Journal of the American Musicological Soci-ety 51 (1998), 201–43; idem, “Towards an Allegorical In-terpretation of Buxtehude’s Funerary Counterpoints,” Mu-sic & Letters 80 (1999), 183–206; idem, Bach and the Mean-ings of Counterpoint (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2002).



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the interpretive methods invoked by Bach’sfugues are consilient with each other, I willargue, because allegory collapses time throughits conceptual precision. By contrast, later com-posers such as Schumann and Mendelssohnstaged transformational processes in theirfugues and thereby suggested their debt to lin-ear notions of time. Critics of counterpoint andfugue worked in tandem with this composi-tional approach, for they relied on a symbolicmethod of interpretation that depended on atemporal process as the mind was moved bypowerful and imprecise ideas.

The keyboard fugue offers a good demon-stration ground for the music-theoretical partof the study. As a specialist genre, it was not asaffected by the changes in performance venue,liturgical context, and audience expectation thatdecisively influenced vocal and other instru-mental genres of counterpoint with the emer-gence of a public sphere and with the advanceof secularization. As a specialist genre, that is,it had an aura of being a pure study in musicalprocesses. The keyboard fugue thus forms asensitive register of changes in how musiciansfelt and experienced time—and their times.

In the seventeenth and early eighteenth cen-turies, musicians treated the keyboard fugue asa highly developed repository of techniques gen-erally used in polyphonic styles, both vocal andinstrumental. Critical approaches to counter-point thus differed little between vocal andinstrumental genres. By the early nineteenthcentury, however, many German musicianswere developing their ideas about Bach aboveall from their experience of his keyboard fugues,through which Bach came to stand as an exem-plar of counterpoint as a whole.13 When thesemusicians spoke of counterpoint, they oftenspoke implicitly of the keyboard fugue. Al-though there were those who looked to Pales-trina and the stile antico or to Handel and the

choral fugue, Bach’s keyboard fugues had prideof place in the canon.14

The Sounds of Time:Texture, Phrasing, and Harmony

Although musicians and critics alike found thefugue a model of durability in part becausethey perceived little change in the proceduresof counterpoint underpinning it—that is, theythought that timeless rules were at issue—theassociation with eternity also sprang from thecharacteristic sound produced by fugal tech-niques. Indeed, the genre would have lost itsrepresentative function as a token of immortal-ity if its constitutive musical processes andtechniques could not lend themselves to inter-pretations of timelessness, despite the manyaspects of the fugue that afforded interpreta-tions of flux and change. As late-eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century composers soughtto translate the fugue into a contemporary mu-sical style, they preserved many of these tech-niques and thus left the fugue available to in-terpretations of durability and immutability,even as they often modified details so as to givetheir fugues a modern sheen and direction.

Christian Friedrich Michaelis’s quasi-phe-nomenological comments on the fugue, quotedabove, can provide a point of departure for thegenre’s time-annulling aspects. As Michaelissaw the matter, the thematic unity of the fugueran counter to a basic human desire for varietyand change, while the combination of voicesinto a polyphonic web overwhelmed thelistener’s powers of comprehension and pro-duced a feeling of sublimity. This feeling ofsublimity in turn incited the listener to thinkof the eternal. For example, in Bach’s Fugue in

13Dahlhaus, “Zur Entstehung der romantischen Bach-Deutung,” in Klassische und romantische Musikästhetik(Laaber: Laaber, 1988), p. 122. Zenck notes that keyboardworks were the first to pull Bach from the shadow ofspecialist concerns and that concerted vocal works wereultimately the ones that gave Bach a public face. MartinZenck, Die Bach-Rezeption des späten Beethoven(Stuttgart: Steiner, 1986), pp. 4–128.

14Ludwig Finscher, “‘. . . gleichsam ein kanonisirterTonmeister’: Zur deutschen Händel-Rezeption im 18.Jahrhundert,” in Kanon und Zensur: Beiträge zurArchäologie der literarischen Kommunikation II, ed. Aleidaand Jan Assmann (Munich: Fink, 1987), pp. 271–83; DetlefAltenberg, “Thibauts Idee der ‘Reinheit der Tonkunst,’”in Studien zur Kirchenmusik im 19. Jahrhundert: FriedrichWilhelm Riedel zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Christoph-Hellmut Mahling (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1994), pp. 35–47; James Garratt, Palestrina and the German RomanticImagination: Interpreting Historicism in Nineteenth-Cen-tury Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).



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D Major from Book II of the Well-TemperedClavier (ex. 1), a triple upbeat figure underpinstwo different motives, one based on a leap, theother on a leap and a scale. The focused play ofthese motives throughout lends the fugue aconstancy of affect: martial regality, to give it aname. The regality changes little, despite modu-lations to such minor-mode keys as the sub-mediant B minor and the mediant F� minor. Tothe ear of Michaelis’s ideal listener, the lack ofvariety would have numbed the mind, and theubiquity of the motives in all the voices wouldhave confounded it. The polyphonic combina-tion reaches great heights in this fugue, wherestretto combinations begin already within thefirst set of fugal entries and increase in densityuntil the climactic peroration (mm. 44–46).

Michaelis was astute in linking the com-bined effect of monothematicism, affectiveunity, and replete polyphony to a sense of time-lessness. The relative immutability and persis-tence of the theme match the theory of sublim-ity to which Michaelis subscribed, a theorythat depended on an idea of a transformativemoment, traditionally described through themetaphor of a lightening bolt. Although fuguesmay not have offered the sudden bolts and joltscharacteristic of the symphony, they did havetheir own way of suiting the traditional topoiof sublimity. They seemed to Michaelis to serveas examples of works so well integrated and sounified—indeed too integrated and too unified—that they could be described as if they wereextended moments, in essence moments ex-tracted from time. In other words, the lack ofvariety and the difficulty of differentiating thevoices allowed a listener to hear the fugue as asingle unit, to feel its power as if it were asingle, sublime instant.15 As we will see,Michaelis would use this description of thefugue’s musical character as the foundation forhis critical readings of the fugue’s significance.Insofar as fugues produced the mental stoppagetraditionally associated with the sublime, they

forced the listener to think about the transcen-dent powers that might envelop human experi-ences and affairs. The sublime experience wasan invitation to meditate on metaphysics.16

It is possible to extend the list of the music-theoretical characteristics that permitted thekeyboard fugue to be heard as if it were anextended instant. Other standard features in-clude the elision of cadences, the submersionof motives and themes in a rhythmic pulse,and the programmatic concentration of har-mony. The characteristic treatment of cadences,themes, and rhythm gives the fugue a textureof implacable insistence. The music seems toextend an initial moment rather than to offerchange. By contrast, the programmatic treat-ment of harmony (by which the fugue makes ademonstration of its tonic key) makes the un-folding of the music centripetal. Events closein on each other rather than open outwards.The initial moment becomes more complex,but it receives relatively little contrast.

The fugue’s characteristic approach to ca-dences has been one of its most frequently notedattributes. Keyboard fugues in particular tendto run right through cadences, to avoid the typeof articulations of events that one might find inthe sonata. In 1913 August Halm wrote that“the fugue offers less variety [than the sonata].On top of that, it permits little respite, for itlacks caesuras in which all voices take part. Itnever releases the listener from its tension.”17

In the Fugue in D Major, relatively clearcadential motions mark the tonic D major (m.16), the dominant A major (m. 20), the mediantF� minor (m. 27), and the return to the tonic (m.40). Bach emphasizes these tonal momentsthrough shifts in register (m. 40), in number ofvoices (m. 16), and in type of material (in each

15On the role of the figure of the sublime instant inMichaelis’s classicist music criticism, see Keith Chapin,“Classicist Terms of Sublimity: Christian Friedrich Michae-lis, Fugue, and Fantasy,” Ad parnassum: A Journal of Eigh-teenth- and Nineteenth-Century Instrumental Music 4(2006), 115–39.

16While the association of the fugue with church musicsurely influenced Michaelis in his ascription of sublimityto the genre, he was too influenced by the empiricism ofEnglish and Kantian thought to offer anything more than atheory of sublime experience based on the form of experi-ence, not its content.17“Die Fuge bietet weniger Abwechselung, ja nochobendrein: sie lässt keine Erholung zu, denn es fehlen ihrdie Zäsuren, an denen alle Stimmen teilnehmen: sieentlässt den Zuhörer nie aus der Spannung.” August Halm,Von zwei Kulturen der Musik, ed. Gustav Wyneken, 3rdedn. (Stuttgart: Klett, 1947), p. 8.



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Example 1: Bach, Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II, Fugue in D Major.



192

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38

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Example 1 (continued)

18“Das Gefühl eines Abstands, in dem Bach diemusikalischen Ereignisse hält, ist nicht nur ein vagevorschwebender Eindruck des Hörers, sondern läßt sichauch an der Sache selbst präzisieren. Das musikalischePhänomen, auf dem es beruht, ist das ungebrochen undunbeirrbar gleichmäßige Fortschreiten der Musik in BachsWerken. Die einzelnen musikalischen Gestalten tretennicht, wie bei Haydn oder Mozart, mit einem eigenen,besonderen rhythmischen Impuls auf, sondern fügen sichunauffällig in einen Rhythmus ein, der vom ersten Taktan feststeht und durch nichts, was später geschieht, ausdem Gleichmaß gebracht werden kann. Man mag davorzurückscheuen, die durchgehende Grundbewegung, dieäußerlich durch den Generalbaß räpresentiert wird,metaphysisch zu deuten. Aber man kann kaum leugnen,daß durch sie die modernen Momente in Bachs Werke ineine Ferne gerückt wird, in der die Umrisse undeutlichwerden.” Dahlhaus, “Innere Dynamik in Bachs Fugen,”Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 123 (1962), 500.19For a reading of Bach as a mannered modern, again tiedto an approach to performance, see Susan McClary, “TheBlasphemy of Talking Politics during Bach Year,” in Mu-sic and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance,and Reception, ed. Susan McClary and Richard Leppert(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 13–62.

instance, a shift from subject exposition to epi-sode, or vice versa), but the constancy of eighth-note pulsation nonetheless pushes the musicforward through each of the cadences. Eventsemerge from the texture. They do not occurdecisively.

Texture dominates events not only at thebroad level of cadences, but also at the locallevel of motives. Bach formulates counter-sub-jects so as to complement the subject and tofill out the prevailing rhythm. In this case,there is no set countersubject, as a motive takenfrom the subject nicely does the trick. Theresulting texture is one in which note lengthsof the lowest common denominator flow al-most constantly. This constancy of motion en-sures that the basic pulse retains a certain au-thority over the pushing and pulling of themotives. As Carl Dahlhaus has written,

the feeling that Bach holds musical events at a dis-tance is not just a vague floating impression of thelistener but can also be specified with reference tothe music itself. The musical phenomenon on whichit is founded is the unbroken and unerring evenprogress of the music in Bach’s works. Individualmusical Gestalten do not present themselves withtheir own individual rhythmic impulse, as in theworks of Haydn or Mozart, but rather meldunnoticeably into a rhythm established firmly inthe first measure and never brought out of balanceby anything that subsequently occurs. One may shyaway from metaphysical interpretations of the ongo-

ing basic motion—represented most obviouslythrough the thoroughbass. But one cannot deny thatthe modern aspects of Bach’s works are pushed intoa distance in which their outlines become unclear.18

It may be that Dahlhaus, influenced by a classi-cist performance tradition, exaggerates the de-gree of balance involved in a fugal texture, buthe is right in his explanation for the topos ofobjectivity in Bach reception.19 Themes andmotives never engage in metric revolt.



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This is not to say that the flow rests easily.The opening of the D-Major Fugue could beheard in either the common time used in anearly version of the work copied by Altnickolor the alla breve that Bach ultimately decidedon.20 No matter: what is important is that thefigures based on the triple eighth-note upbeatset up a strong pendulum motion in the exposi-tion that is sustained for the rest of the fugue.Once this pulse is established, however, Bachoften plays with motives that ride against it.The play begins in m. 7, where the scalar mo-tive moves toward both strong and weak beats.It occurs again in m. 16, and in general it is notdifficult to find per arsin et thesin reinterpreta-tions of motives. They thus support the poly-phonic plenitude that inspired the awe of thesublime in Michaelis. Yet the plenitude is tex-tural, not metric. Even when the motive isuncoupled from its metric context, it accompa-nies other motivic motions that anchor thebroad duple time. Moreover, the bass neverrides against the meter as the upper three voicesdo. Throughout the fugue, the bass emphasizesthe strong beats of the measure, so that har-monic and metric foundations of the fugue sup-port each other.

To say that Bach retains an underlying regu-larity of pulse is not to deny him his composi-tion against the grain, to use Lawrence Dreyfus’sphrase, but only to note that the basic alterna-tion of thesis and arsis, or downbeat and up-beat, is strong enough to ensure that subtleemphases on weak beats point up the power ofthe pulse rather than overturn it.21 Like othercontrapuntal artifices, such as inversions, ret-rogrades, and canons of various dimensions,the subject per arsin et thesin demonstratesmastery of harmony, the technical and aes-thetic point of most fugues until early in theeighteenth century, when empirically mindedcritics pooh-poohed the high-flown claims of

the genre’s champions. The demonstrationarises in part through the art of contrapuntalcombination and in part through the reinter-pretation of tonally inflected melodic events ina new metric context. Because the technicaland aesthetic point of the fugue is harmony,the point of the subject per arsin et thesin is toshow the ability of the musician to move thetheme without upsetting the pulse.

The cultivation of such harmony in variousforms is another feature of the fugue that al-lows it to annul the passage of time. Harmony,and especially tonal harmony, may propel de-sire and effect change, but it also provides themeans of changing the character of such pro-pulsion.22 Fugue and other contrapuntal genres,especially the ricercar, had long served special-ist musicians as demonstration pieces in thecomposition of musical works in the strongsense of the word.23 Insofar as these musicianstreated the entity as a work, they closed itstime off from the time that precedes and fol-lows. Through harmony, they could close offmusical time (through returns to the tonic),control the centrifugal tendencies of modula-tion (by limiting structural modulations to keysclosely related to the tonic), and control therelationship between contrapuntal lines(through the privilege assigned to consonanceand the control of dissonance). Although manygenres drew upon these techniques, the fugueis perhaps unique in the degree to which theideal of harmony informs the thematic mate-rial and the principles by which that materialis deployed. Harmony receives programmaticand demonstrative treatment in the fugue sub-ject itself, in its characteristic mode of presen-tation, and in its various recombinations withitself.

In the eighteenth century, fugue subjects fre-quently defined the tonality of a piece withoutthe aid of any accompaniment. Elaborations ofthe tonic triad or of a defining scalar segment

20David Ledbetter, Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier: The 48Preludes and Fugues (New Haven: Yale University Press,2002), p. 258. David Ledbetter has suggested that Bachchose the alla breve signature, more appropriate to stileantico fugues, to ensure that performers did not parse themeasure with too heavy a hand.21Laurence Dreyfus, Bach and the Patterns of Invention(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp.33–58.

22Wilhelm Seidel, Werk und Werkbegriff in der Musik-geschichte (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft,1987), pp. 44–66.23John Butt, “The Seventeenth-Century Musical ‘Work,’”in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music,ed. Tim Carter and John Butt (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 2005), pp. 28–31.



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of a key often delineated a “melodic tonality,”as Roger Bullivant has termed the principle.24

The subject of the Fugue in D Major is a rela-tive exception. The fall of a fifth to G andsubsequent rise to B feint toward the subdomi-nant, only to receive a correction by the an-swer, where the subdominant emphasis is re-placed by a tonic one and a short codetta bringsthe tonic back before the third voice enters. Inretrospect, both G and B close in on A, squeez-ing the pitch toward the fifth scale degree andthen down toward the third (F �). The subjecthas a IV–V–I cadential progression as its orga-nizing principle; the key of the piece is neverreally in doubt.

The subject and answer may also emphasizethe tonal nodes of the piece (tonic and domi-nant for the eighteenth-century fugue), andthereby announce functional harmony as if thefugue were a programmatic statement or mu-sic-theoretical manifesto. In a regular round-robin, the first voice of our sample fugue beginson D, the second on A, the third on D, thefourth on A. It would be easy to overlook thepoint of such technical characteristics of thefugue: tonal and real answers, the artful ex-change of first and fifth scale degrees, and themaintenance of interval relationships withinfugue subject. They are extreme practices ofmusical introversion. They work to overcometime by creating an intimate link between atheme and its continuation, so that the con-tinuation appears not as something new butonly as a cyclical return of what has been be-fore. Neither thematic transformation nor thethematic marking of modulatory journeys is aprimary concern. That is reserved for thematiccombination, which, as Ulrich Siegele, Law-rence Dreyfus, and Karol Berger have noted, isthe ruling tendency in Bach’s fugues.25 In addi-tion to encouraging continuity of texture andmood, and hence the annulment of time, thefeatures of fugal writing cultivated by Bach

mask the characteristics of fugue that admit offlux. They divert attention from the epony-mous “flight” (Latin fuga) of voices and fromthe intensification of thematic density and har-monic complexity over the course of the com-position.

Yet such flux should not, and eventuallycould not, be ignored. As just noted, Fuga isLatin for “flight,” and the name shows that thefugue can be heard as a model, not of stasis, butof change. The subject (dux, leader) flees theanswer (comes, follower), whether in the con-stant imitation of a canon or the more fleetingimitations of the fugue. The relationship be-tween the flight of voices and models of tempo-ral flux can also be seen in the use that manylater composers found for their study of Bach’sfugues. As Dahlhaus observed, nineteenth-cen-tury composers broke down Bach’s fugues intotheir constituent techniques in order to pressthe genre into new service, notably for dynamicdevelopment and cathartic codas.26 Mozart,Beethoven, Schumann, Wagner, and many oth-ers studied the fugue to learn the processes ofmotivic-thematic working and development ingeneral.27 Heard in the right way or in the rightcontext, the constancy of theme could appearless as a static arabesque than as a fluctuatingteleology.

24Roger Bullivant, Fugue (London: Hutchinson, 1971), p.40.25Ulrich Siegele, “The Four Conceptual Stages of the Fuguein C Minor, WTC I,” in Bach Studies, ed. Don O. Franklin(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 197–224; Dreyfus, Bach and the Patterns of Invention, pp. 169–88; Berger, Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow, pp. 89–102.

26Dahlhaus, Die Musiktheorie im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert:Erster Teil: Grundzüge einer Systematik, Geschichte derMusiktheorie, vol. 10 (Darmstadt: WissenschaftlicheBuchgesellschaft, 1984), p. 173.27On the differences between the leading of themes througha contrapuntal texture and motivic-thematic working, seeStefan Kunze, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Sinfonie G-Moll,KV 550 (Munich: Fink, 1968), pp. 119–28; Nicole Schwindt-Gross, Drama und Diskurs: Zur Beziehung zwischenSatztechnik und motivischem Prozeß am Beispiel derdurchbrochenen Arbeit in den Streichquartetten Mozartsund Haydns (Laaber: Laaber, 1989), pp. 13–22. The litera-ture on Bach reception is very large; valuable studies ofthe compositional wisdom that later composers drew fromBach include Matthew Dirst, Bach’s Well-Tempered Cla-vier in Musical Thought and Practice, 1750–1850 (PhDdiss., Stanford University, 1996); William Kinderman,“Bachian Affinities in Beethoven,” in Bach Perspectives 3:Creative Responses to Bach from Mozart to Hindemith,ed. Michael Marissen (Lincoln: University of NebraskaPress, 1998), pp. 81–108; Charles Rosen, The RomanticGeneration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,1995), pp. 279–360; Christian Thorau, “Richard WagnersBach,” in Bach und die Nachwelt: Band 2: 1850–1900, ed.Michael Heinemann and Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen (Laaber:Laaber, 1999), pp. 163–99.



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A second feature of many fugues that favorsflux is the tendency to build toward climaxes.These climaxes could be achieved through cul-minating strettos, as theorists of fugue such asBononcini and Reincken suggested as early asthe seventeenth century, or more generallythrough the heightened levels of activity, notedmore recently by Joel Lester.28 The D-MajorFugue engages in stretto from the beginning,yet still saves the most dramatic instance forthe end. The first two entries of the subject areseparated by the time of three half notes, butthe third and fourth (mm. 5–7) already collapsethe distance to two half notes. The expositionthus announces stretto as its program and de-velops it systematically as the fugue progresses.After the first contraction the distance squeezesfurther down to a single half note (m. 14) andfinally to a quarter note (m. 27). This last strettooccurs just past the midway point, after whichthe fugue occupies itself with ever more dra-matic arrangements of the contracted stretto atthe quarter note. The pivotal instance at mm.27–29 involves only two voices (though mo-tives derived from the subject mimic a third);the next adds a third voice (mm. 33–35); andthe final instance engages all four voices in astretto that cascades from the highest pitch ofthe piece downward (mm. 44–46). These strettosalso work toward harmonic complexity. Thefirst maps out D major; the second stronglypoints toward the subdominant G major by m.35, but muddies the modulation through a dra-matic fall of a diminished fifth to the tonic’sleading tone (G to C �); and the third returns tothe tonic but invokes ambiguities around boththe dominant and the subdominant. The finalstretto dissolves downwards into the final ca-dence and thereby rescinds some of the senseof arrival.29

The techniques of fugue, then, lend them-selves both to cyclical explorations and to lin-ear developments. On the one hand, the fugueplumbs an affective state as it combines itsthemes; on the other, it marshals its combina-tions into an order that does indeed lead some-where, whether to a climax, or, as is the casehere, to a climax followed by an anticlimax.Through their modifications of traditional fugalprocedures, nineteenth-century fugues throwthe relative timelessness of the keyboard fugueinto oppositional relief, usually by finding waysto emphasize climaxes and goals. Beethoven,Mendelssohn, Schumann, and other composersself-consciously took issue with the fugue asthey sought to turn it toward their expressiveends. The fugue became ever less a token ofbeing and ever more one of becoming.

Composers staged such becoming most spec-tacularly through dramatic shifts in texture andmood over the course of the fugue, at timesaccompanied by a concomitant acceleration oftempo. Schumann’s first Fugue, for organ onthe name BACH, op. 60 (1845), draws attentionto its own fine flow through a tonally ambigu-ous “characteristic” theme, through the accel-eration of tempo, and through a gradual shiftfrom polyphony toward homophony. Schumanndeploys the theme itself so as to suggest trans-formation: the chromatic opening on the pitchesB�, A, C, B� intimates minor modes and strangeharmonies (the supertonic, and in the answer,the submediant, though the exact tonal regionsseem less important than the quality of chro-matic alienation). The chromaticism of thisopening gives way to a triumphant turn to thetonic, and the sense of triumph increases withthe completion of each entry of the subject (ex.2). Schumann’s treatment of the BACH themethus not only pays homage to a composer ofthe past but also suggests a metamorphosis. Bycontrast, J. S. Bach himself introduced theBACH theme in the Art of Fugue as the fourthsubject of a quadruple fugue in a minor mode.The theme’s chromaticism does little to swaythe pervasive, somber D minor that dominatesthe fugue and the Art of Fugue in general.

The heroic narrative of struggle toward tri-umph is also mapped out in Schumann’s pieceas a whole. The central way stations on thispath are the acceleration of tempo and the in-

28Paul M. Walker, “Stretto,” Grove Music Online; OxfordMusic Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/sub-scriber/article/grove/music/26948 (accessed 17 October2010). Joel Lester, “Heightening Levels of Activity and J.S. Bach’s Parallel-Section Constructions,” Journal of theAmerican Musicological Society 54 (2001), 68–69. See alsoBerger, Bach’s Cycle, Time’s Arrow, pp. 96–98.29Joseph Kerman notes a similar effect at the end of thefirst fugue of the Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I. JosephKerman, The Art of Fugue: Bach Fugues for Keyboard,1715–1750 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005),p. 9.



196

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CENTURYMUSIC � � � � � � � ��

� � � � ��

��Manual

Pedal

�

Langsam

Example 2: Schumann, Fugue No. 1, op. 60 (Fugues on the Name BACH),first two subject entries, mm. 1–5.

crease in volume (Nach und nach schnellerund stärker, mm. 34ff.; ex. 3) and, most spec-tacularly, the shift toward homophony at theend. For much of the fugue, Schumann followsBach’s usual practice in the Well-Tempered Cla-vier: he maintains the number of voices estab-lished in the opening entries. In this case, thereare five voices, four in the manuals and one inthe pedal. (In his own fugues for organ Bachtended to worry less about the strict mainte-nance of the number of voices.) But at m. 41,Schumann adds two extra voices and thereby

� � � � � � � � ��

� � � � ��

� � � � ��

��

Nach und nach schneller und stärker33

Example 3: Schumann, Fugue No. 1, mm. 33–35.

� � � � � � � � � ��

� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � ��

� ��

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�

41


dramatically changes the texture (ex. 4), and inthe rest of the fugue he freely adds voices tocreate distinct moments of climax. Althoughthe polyphonic combination of the theme withitself and with motives drawn from it does notcease, it is increasingly submerged in full-voicedchords. The increase in tempo accentuates theshift toward homophony; as the pulse shiftsfrom the half note to the half measure, thesnaking of the theme becomes less thematicand more ornamental (ex. 5). One hears chordsever more and the polyphonic web ever less. As



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� � � � � � � � � � ��

� � � � � � � � � � ��

� � � � � � � � � ��

��

51

��

the fugue grows in sonorousness, speed, andsimplicity, it seems to overcome the chromaticpolyphony of the opening. The fugue dramati-cally stages becoming, in both the theme andthe overall design.

Such attention to transformation was notuncommon at the beginning of the nineteenthcentury. Schumann’s other five Fugues on thename BACH, op. 60, stage similar metamor-phoses. All move toward homophony at theend (though to varying degrees). The quick andplayful No. 5 works toward its ending with wrywit. The last, No. 6, mirrors the first fugue inits move toward cathartic homophony throughan acceleration in tempo. Nor was Schumannalone in this practice. In the first of his op. 35Fugues, Mendelssohn dramatically acceleratedfrom fugue to chorale (ex. 6a–c), and in othersof the set he used changes in character andtexture to mark vital differences between be-ginning and end.30

The Interpretation of Time:Allegory and Symbol

Although compositional technique may sug-gest changes in the way musicians experiencedtime and sought to articulate it in music, thesignificance that one finds in the fugue de-pends to a large degree on the process of inter-


30On Mendelssohn’s approach to the fugue, see RudolfStephan, “Über Mendelssohns Kontrapunkt,” in Das Prob-lem Mendelssohn, ed. Dahlhaus (Regensburg: Bosse, 1974),pp. 201–07; R. Larry Todd, “Me voilà perruqué: Mendels-sohn’s Six Preludes and Fugues Op. 35 Reconsidered,” inMendelssohn Studies, ed. R. Larry Todd (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1992), pp. 162–99.

pretation itself. Fugue, canon, and other ex-treme forms of polyphony have long been seenas a sign of transcendentals: God and empire,31

the Volk,32 objectivity,33 the long tradition,34

Schopenhauer’s Will,35 or even, if one takes amusician like Hindemith, something vaguelyresembling a Green Party musical environmen-talism.36 However, it is not the music alonethat reveals the worldview, but the music andthe mode of interpretation taken together.

31Johann Joseph Fux, Gradus ad Parnassum (Vienna: JoannisPetri van Ghelen, 1725). See Friedrich Riedel, “Der‘Reichsstil’ in der deutschen Musikgeschichte des 18. Jahr-hunderts,” in Bericht über den Internationalen Musik-wissenschaftlichen Kongreß Kassel 1962, ed. GeorgReichert and Martin Just (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1963), pp.34–36.32Johann Nikolaus Forkel, Allgemeine Geschichte derMusik, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Schwickert, 1788–1801), I, 47–48.33E. T. A. Hoffmann, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writ-ings: Kreisleriana, The Poet and the Composer, Music Criti-cism, ed. David Charlton, trans. Martyn Clarke (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 105 and 113. Forthe Romantics, objectivity was a double-edged sword. Inhis “Highly Random Thoughts,” Hoffmann describes therules of counterpoint as fixed entities comparable to thefixed ratios of proportion, but he also enthuses over con-trapuntal music as inspired by mystical rules that elicithorror.34Rochlitz, “Die Fuge: Zunächst an Dilettanten und Laien,”pp. 141–77.35Ernst Kurth, Grundlagen des Linearean Kontrapunkts:Bachs melodische Polyphonie, 2nd edn. (Berlin: MaxHesses, 1922).36Paul Hindemith linked his poetics and aesthetics of mu-sic to a metaphysics of musical materials and human prac-tices of making and hearing music. Hindemith, The Craftof Musical Composition, trans. Arthur Mendel and OttoOrtmann, 2 vols. (Mainz: Schott, 1941–42), I, 15–16; idem,A Composer’s World: Horizons and Limitations: CharlesEliot Norton Lectures, 1949–1950 (New York: Anchor,1961), pp. 239–57; idem, “Sterbende Gewässer,” pp. 314–36.



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a. mm. 1–3.

� � � � � � � � � � � ��

��

Andante espressivo

b. mm. 58–59.

� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � ��

� � � � � � � � � � ��

�

� � � �

58

cresc.

accel. poco a poco al Allegro con fuoco

�

c. mm. 104–07.

� � � � � ��

��

� � � �ffdo con forza

104

� � � �

sempre forte e tenutoChoral

il Basso dim.

piano e stacc.

Example 6: Mendelssohn, Preludes and Fugues, op. 35, Fugue No. 1.

Bach’s tendency in his keyboard fugues to studyhis subject, to avoid the emphatic articulationof events, and thus to produce temporal cyclescoincides with the prevalent interpretative strat-egy of his time: allegory. By contrast, Schu-mann’s tendency to stage dramas of becomingin his fugues is consilient with the favor givento symbols by his contemporaries. Where alle-gory crystallizes time and events into a concep-tual image and thereby annuls time, symbolopens up a potentially infinite process of inter-pretation in which one wheels through the pos-sible consummations of an aesthetic idea.

Karol Berger has taken up the distinctionbetween allegory and symbol to differentiatebetween the systems of metaphysical thoughtavailable to Bach and to Mozart. God was acertainty for Bach, and from this theologicalcertainty one could derive moral laws. By con-trast, Immanuel Kant argued that God was im-possible to know, but one was morally requiredto think of his existence. God was an idea ofreason. In Berger’s neat formulation: for Bach,

harmony was a metaphor for God; for Goethe,God was a metaphor for harmony.37 In otherwords, before philosophical skepticism spread,allegories carried the weight of conviction anddealt in the coin of rational certainties. Onceskepticism spread, symbols intimated truths ofa different order.

If one turns from the ontological differencesbetween allegory and symbol to the practice ofinterpretation, one finds that the difference ofapproach has great influence on how one hearsand understands music. The interpretive strat-egy has the effect of pushing the music alongthe continuum between stasis and teleology inone direction or the other. In an allegorical in-terpretation, Bach’s music appears less teleo-logical than it does in a symbolic one. For thisreason, an allegorical interpretation can down-play the undeniable eschatological teleology andmusical processuality in Bach. A symbolic in-

37Berger, Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow, pp. 127–29.



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terpretation can emphasize the same teleologyin Schumann’s fugues. Such differences can alsoinfluence performance style, making Bach’sfugues now architectural, now fluid and flow-ing.38

To grasp the foundation of the distinction,one can turn to the famous definitions of alle-gory and symbol made by Johann Wolfgang vonGoethe in 1807. With “allegory” Goethe neatlycaptured the rationalist tendency of the aes-thetics and criticism of the early and mid-eigh-teenth century; with “symbol” he showed hisallegiance to an entirely different set of presup-positions about how the mind relates to itsworld. Of course, the terms themselves haveproved quite flexible (not to say slippery) overthe course of history. What is important inGoethe’s distinction is the role of time in inter-pretation, not the terms per se.

In allegory, Goethe argued, a sign points to aconcept. More exactly, as he wrote in a note-book, “allegory transforms a phenomenon intoa concept, and the concept into an image, butin such a way that the concept is limited andcan always be had and held completely in theimage and can be expressed through it.”39 Whatis significant in this brief characterization isthe limitation of the concept (Begriff). The con-cept carries precision with it. In more philo-sophically pregnant language, Immanuel Kantwrote that concepts were “functions” based on“the unity of the action by which differentrepresentations are ordered under a commonone.”40 The concept crystallizes thought. In its

ability to capture thought, allegory was alignedwith imitation, which shared the tendency toseek clarity and correspondence. To discover“imitation” was to attend to correspondencesbetween signifiers and signifieds in such a wayas to render the process of perception and cog-nition invisible.

Gerhard Kurz has discussed the relationshipbetween acts of understanding (Verstehen) andallegory. While the sense that the meaning ofallegory is fixed and independent of interpret-ers is a misunderstanding, he notes, it is onethat says much about allegory. “In actuality,we have the impression of an independentmeaning because an interpretive act has al-ready occurred. However, it is an interpretiveact that fits into the expectation of understand-ing in such a way that it does not seem to havetaken place.”41 In other words, one may requiretime to decipher an allegory, but the characterof the significance espied is such that the timetaken seems irrelevant. The endpoint of inter-pretation is indeed a point, not an ever-vanish-ing horizon in a process of understanding.

In his portrayal of allegory, Goethe consum-mated a tradition of aesthetics that tended toemphasize visual models of perception and thusto deemphasize the action of time. In otherwords, his definition of allegory was as muchretrospective as it was a description of an ongo-ing practice. The allegorical tradition dependedon the presupposition that proper thought tradedin clear ideas, each one crystallized into anentity. Visual metaphors helped philosophersto emphasize the crystallization. In the earlyeighteenth century, writers on perception andcognition tended to classify ideas along twoaxes: clear (klar) and obscure (dunkel) on theone hand, and distinct (deutlich) and indistinct/fused (undeutlich/verworren) on the other. Al-though the vocabulary and the construal of theaxes varied from writer to writer, all agreedthat perception needed to attain clarity in orderto count as cognition. The primary differencebetween aesthetic and rational cognition lay inthe opposition between the distinct and theindistinct (or fused) perception of an entity. In

38Hermann Danuser, “Dom und Strom: Bachs cis-Moll-Fuge (BWV 849) und die Ästhetik des Erhabenen,” inMusikästhetik und Analyse: Festschrift Wilhelm Seidelzum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Michael Märker and LotharSchmidt (Laaber: Laaber, 2002), pp. 105–34.39“Die Allegorie verwandelt die Erscheinung in einenBegriff, den Begriff in ein Bild, doch so, daß der Begriff imBilde immer noch begränzt und vollständig zu halten undzu haben und an demselben auszusprechen sei.” JohannWolfgang von Goethe, Schriften zur Kunst: Schriften zurLiteratur: Maximen und Reflexionen, “Hamburger”Ausgabe, 14 vols. (Hamburg: Wegner, 1953), XII, no. 1112.40“Alle Anschauungen, als sinnlich, beruhen aufAffektionen, die Begriffe also auf Funktionen. Ich versteheaber unter Funktion die Einheit der Handlung, verschiedeneVorstellungen unter einer gemeinschaftlichen zu ordnen.”Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. WilhelmWeischedel, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974),I, 109 (Akedemie-Ausgabe, pp. A68/B93).

41Gerhard Kurz, Metapher, Allegorie, Symbol (Göttingen:Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982), p. 30.



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distinct perception, one perceived all the fea-tures of a whole. The distinctness allowed oneto understand the entity. In an indistinct per-ception, the features seemed confused, that is,“fused” together. They could not be distin-guished. But the cloud of fusion carried a liningof aesthetic silver: in the absence of the ratio-nal understanding of distinct features, the per-ceiver felt a sensuous or aesthetic pull of greatpower.42

Common to both rational and aesthetic cog-nition in this model, however, is the striving ofthe mind toward a clear idea, and indeed to-ward an idea that mirrors the world. No matterwhether one perceived the artificial signs oflanguage or the ostensibly natural signs of mu-sic and gesture, one re-created the thing in themind’s eye. It is no coincidence that the Ger-mans designated intuitio, commonly associatedat the time with the first stage of cognition,with a word having a visual root: Anschauung—schauen—“to look.” The immobility of the pic-ture served as a model of successful cognition.

Interpreters of fugue and counterpoint gen-erally tended to privilege allegorical stasis un-til the end of the eighteenth century. Despitethis consistency of interpretive method, how-ever, musicians and writers could fasten ontovarious facets of counterpoint and fugue andwork out their allegories in different ways.Originally, neo-Platonic allegories relied on con-gruencies between interval ratios and the ra-tios and numbers underpinning various meta-physical perfections. The metaphysical signifi-cance of counterpoint depended not so muchon music and temporal extension as on thesimplicity with which the ruling consonancescould be described. A ratio of 2:3 described theinterval of the fifth, but also provided the basisfor an allegory of sound and world. The sim-plicity of a mathematical expression capturedthe revolutions of the spheres, the movementsof the human soul, and the sounds of music. A

classic instance of this allegory was drawn fromCicero’s “Dream of Scipio.” It is cited, for ex-ample, by Johann Joseph Fux in the Gradus adparnassum: “But the other eight spheres, twoof which move with the same velocity, pro-duce seven different sounds, —a number whichis the key of almost everything. Learned men,by imitating this harmony on stringed instru-ments and in song, have gained for themselvesa return to this region.”43 The planets revolvedand musicians performed in time, but the linkposited between musica mundana and musicainstrumentalis was a static one, grounded onthe immutabilities of number.

Such musica speculativa retained its holdthrough the eighteenth century, especially inGermany, but with the emergence of polyphonymusicians interested in practical music wouldsupplement the allegories of number derivedfrom Pythagorean and neo-Platonic thoughtwith allegories based on musical lines or pro-cesses. However, the tendency to seek clarityof image remained strong, no matter the imita-tions of nature discovered or the allegories read.Writers frequently matched the musical linesto singing angels. This approach can be tracedfar back. In his Treatise on the Twofold Prac-tice of Church Music in Divine Services(Tractatus de duplici ritu cantus ecclesiasticiin divinis officiis), Egidius Carlerius (ca. 1390–1472) noted that polyphony “is a reflection ofheavenly joys. For sweet and well-constructedmusic conveys an image of angels and saints,unceasingly praising the name of the Lord.” Inhis preface to a collection of part songs in 1538,Martin Luther offered a variation of this imagewhen he wrote that the polyphonic movementsof parts around a cantus firmus “seem to presenta kind of divine dance so that even those of ourday who have only a most limited amount ofsentiment and emotion gain the impressionthat there exists nothing more wonderful andbeautiful.”44

42David E. Wellbery, Lessing’s Laocoon: Semiotics and Aes-thetics in the Age of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1984), pp. 9–98; Ulrich Leisinger, Leibniz-Reflexe in der deutschen Musiktheorie des 18. Jahrhunderts(Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1994); MatthewRiley, Musical Listening in the German Enlightenment:Attention, Wonder and Astonishment (Aldershot: Ashgate,2004), pp. 10–21.

43Johann Joseph Fux, Gradus ad Parnassum oder Anführungzur Regelmäßigen Musicalischen Composition, trans.Lorenz Mizler (Leipzig: Lorenz Mizler, 1742), p. 34. Trans-lation from Marcus Tullius Cicero, De re publica, Delegibus, trans. Clinton Walker Keyes, Loeb Classical Li-brary (London: Heinemann, 1928), p. 273.44Egidus Carlerius and Johannes Tinctoris, On the Dignity& the Effects of Music: Two Fifteenth-Century Treatises,



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By the beginning of the eighteenth century,writers increasingly favored more technicallyprecise allegories, perhaps influenced by Carte-sian or later forms of rationalism. In the intro-duction to his Harmonologia musica (1702),Andreas Werckmeister first detailed the neo-Platonic scheme. Then, however, he relatedthe inversions of musical themes directly tothe crossing of planetary paths in the heavens:

The heavens revolve and circulate steadily so thatone body now moves on top but at other timeschanges and is found on the bottom. Indeed, thiscirculation is to be found in the earth and on it, andalso in microcosm in man. For this reason, the phi-losophers say: Superius est inferius, & inferius estsuperius. We also have these mirrors of heaven andnature in musical harmony. The voice that is on topcan become the lowest or middle one, and the low-est and middle voices can in turn become the high-est. One voice can become all other voices and noother voice must be added, and at least four voicescan be transformed in different ways in good har-mony.45

Another writer to surround the technical as-pects of music with a metaphysical aura wasJohann Abraham Birnbaum. In his well-knowndefense of Bach against the journalist JohannAdolph Scheibe, Birnbaum took up the philo-sophical language made popular by the ratio-nalist philosopher Christian Wolff, a followerof Leibniz. While Scheibe had criticized Bachfor a lack of clear upper lines, Birnbaum de-fended the propriety of full-voiced polyphonyusing Wolff’s term “perfection,” a term that

Christoph Wolff has rightly signaled as a key toBach’s music: “For music consists of harmony,and harmony becomes far more complete if allthe voices collaborate to form it. Accordinglythis is not a failing but rather a musical perfec-tion.”46 At least with respect to its formal quali-ties, a “perfection” was characterized by a highdegree of inner integration. While Birnbaumdid not explicitly relate Bach’s music to theperfection of divine creation, the term owed itsresonance and prestige at the time to debatesabout the perfection of God and the perfectionof the created world.47 Another adherent ofWolffian precepts, Moses Mendelssohn, wouldground his Principal Foundations of the FineArts and Sciences (1757) on the perfection ofGod, “the most perfect craftsman” (der voll-kommenste Werckmeister). Part of the divineplan included the motivation of human actionthrough the sensuous pleasure taken in morerestricted perfections, that is, works of art. “Ifthe cognition of such perfection is sensuous, itis called beauty.”48 Perfections in the world ofart ultimately reflected back upon the perfec-tion of creation.

A similar approach underpins each of theseinterpretations of counterpoint. Cosmic ormetaphysical entities are made to correspondto the musical entities. The subjective experi-ence of counterpoint is subordinated to an ob-jective description of the organization of parts,whether the parts are mathematical ratios, the-matic inversions, or well-integrated works. Onenotes a characteristic organization of parts atboth the cosmic and the musical levels (ratio,dance, inversion, or complexity and integra-tion), and then one posits a direct relationshipbetween the sign of musical harmony and itsmetaphysical or cosmic referent. All of the writ-ers involved were highly conscious of the rhe-

ed. J. Donald Cullington and Reinhard Strohm, trans. J.Donald Cullington (London: Institute of Advanced Musi-cal Studies, King’s College, 1996), p. 27; Walter E. Buszin,“Luther on Music,” Musical Quarterly 32 (1946), 82.45“Wie nun der Himmel in steter Revolution und Circula-tion stehet, da dasjenige, was itzo oben gehet, eine andereZeit wieder verändert wird und unten kömt, also ist solcheCirculation in und an der Erdkugel: auch an dem Menschenals Microcosmo zu finden: daher die Philosophi zu sagenpflegen; Superius est inferius, & inferius est superius. DiesenHimmels- und Natur-Spiegel haben wir auch in derMusicalischen harmonia, denn diejenige Stimme so da obengehet, kann wieder die unterste und mittelere werden, unddie untersten und mitleren können wieder die oberen war-den.” Andreas Werckmeister, Harmonologia Musica, oderKurtze Anleitung zur musicalischen Composition (Frank-furt: Calvisius, 1702; facs. Laaber: Laaber, 2003), p. ix.

46The Bach Reader: A Life of Johann Sebastian Bach inLetters and Documents, ed. Hans T. David Arthur Mendel,rev. and supplemented edn. (New York: Norton, 1966), p.246.47Christoph Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach: The LearnedMusician (New York: Norton, 2000), pp. 465–72.48“Ist nun die Erkenntniß dieser Vollkommenheit sinnlich;so wird sie Schönheit genannt.” Moses Mendelssohn,“Ueber die Hauptgrunsätze der schönen Künste undWissenschaften,” in Ästhetische Schriften in Auswahl, ed.Otto F. Best (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchge-sellschaft, 1974), pp. 175–76.



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torical effects of music. They would never haveattempted their allegories of counterpoint hadthe various parts not produced sensuous har-mony, and harmony of a highly affecting na-ture. Nonetheless, the allegorical interpreta-tion treated the relationships of the elementsalmost as if their temporality was not impor-tant. The atemporality of the sign was congru-ent with the precision of the concept, so thatthe interpreted thing and the allegorical pro-cess of interpretation supported each other.

Although the practice of allegory remainedstrong in the nineteenth and twentieth centu-ries, it lost prestige toward the end of the eigh-teenth century, becoming ever more associatedwith caricature and the political cartoon, onlyto return to a certain favor in the early twenti-eth century with changed epistemological andontological presuppositions.49 The source of theloss of prestige was a new approach to interpre-tation. Writers on the arts began to complicatethe relationship between the data provided bythe senses and the ideas arrived at by the mind.The arrival of thought at a concept or ideabecame less important than the process of thejourney. Symbol began to take the place occu-pied by allegory.

In a symbol, the direct substantive relationbetween a thing and its referent is less impor-tant than a vague but more flexible suggestive-ness in the thing that ultimately can only beintuited. For Goethe, “A symbol transforms aphenomenon into an idea, and the idea into animage, and in such a way that the idea alwaysremains infinitely effective and unattainable,and even expressed in all languages, nonethe-less remains inexpressible.”50 Goethe rooted thesymbol in a process of intuitive contemplation(or Anschauung) that relied for its potential onthe immersion of a person in all the finer differ-ences in the world.51 What is particularly im-portant in the present context is the temporal-

ity of the process: the symbol “remains infi-nitely effective and unattainable.” Goethe’scomment refers both to the mental processesof a perceiver and to the lasting untranslatabilityof the symbol for any interpretive community.The symbol remains veiled over time for bothindividual and community.

It is fair to say that one of the chief featuresof symbolic interpretation as it was practicedaround 1800 was the central importance of sub-jective experience, in particular of subjectiveexperience that depended on temporal exten-sion for its power. When a musical work wastaken as a symbol, it did not just equal anotherthing. Rather the work produced a certain typeof experience that suggested some otherwiseunavailable truth. It was precisely because theexperience could not be fixed in a concept thatcritics were attracted to it. Such experiencesflirted with the boundaries of human under-standing and permitted a metaphysics that re-spected the achievements of the Enlightenment.

For examples of this process in interpreta-tion, one can turn again to Christian FriedrichMichaelis. He was well equipped to deal withissues of musical technique and aesthetics atthe cusp between Enlightenment and Roman-ticism. Michaelis had studied with Bach’s suc-cessor at the School of St. Thomas in Leipzig,and he had also heard the lectures of Schillerand Fichte at the university in Jena.

Michaelis placed time at the heart of theinterpretive process. In the essay “On the Sub-lime in Music” (1801), he addressed a variety ofcomposers and genres typically judged sublimearound 1800. He included the fugue amongthem, though he did not distinguish it from thesymphony or other instrumental genres.52 Ofthe music to be found in such genres, Michae-lis first posits musical passages of overwhelm-ing power. He then writes:

Faced by such a fast and seemingly endless change ofsensations, by such an unstoppably rushing and dis-appearing quantity of impressions, by such speedy,49See Bainard Cowan, “Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Alle-

gory,” New German Critique 22 (1981), 109–22.50“Die Symbolik verwandelt die Erscheinung in Idee, dieIdee in ein Bild, und so, daß die Idee im Bild immerunendlich wirksam und unerreichbar bleibt und, selbst inallen Sprachen ausgesprochen, doch unaussprechlichbliebe.” Goethe, Schriften zur Kunst: Schriften zur Litera-tur: Maximen und Reflexionen, No. 1113.51Kurz, Metapher, Allegorie, Symbol, pp. 69–71.

52Later in his career Michaelis distinguished between genresmore finely, for instance, in the essay “Etwas zurRechtfertigung des Contrapunctes” (1817), which appearedin the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung mit besondererRücksicht auf den österreichischen Kaiserstaat.



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similar though unusual movements, the imagina-tion knows how to find neither beginning nor end,and can find no place to stand firm. This transport-ing stream of changes has something terrible aboutit. At once it is now an image of the evanescence oflife and the threatening power of nature, now animage of eternity. It fills the soul with sublime sen-timents when the soul has assured itself and, throughreason, risen above the power of mere appearances.53

Time here enters into play in three ways. First,there is a series of events that leads the mindfrom its initial state of mental balance to aterrifying breakdown and then to an exhilarat-ing recovery. This three-stage experience—bal-ance, breakdown, and recovery—provokes themind to imagine great things.54 Second, thetranscendentals toward which the music pointsare those that emphasize the temporality ofhuman existence, namely evanescence and eter-nity, common themes in the arts for centuriesto be sure.

Third, the musical images circulate in theimagination of the ideal listener. To repeat theessential phrase about the stream of changes:“At once [zugleich] it is now [bald] an image ofthe evanescence of life and the threateningpower of nature, now [bald] an image of eter-nity.” In this paraphrase of traditional topoi ofsublimity, music provides the images of eva-nescence and eternity both at once and oneafter the other. The slippage between simulta-neity and succession generated by the words

“at once” (zugleich) and “now” (bald) indicatesthe powerful indeterminacy underpinning thesymbol and distinguishes it from the significa-tions of allegory. The same slippages illustratesthe way that symbolic understanding, as it wasunderstood by many writers from Kant onward,depended on the process of thought, not on itscrystallization in clear concepts.

It was not just the philosophically mindedmusic critic who favored process in interpreta-tion. A poetic enthusiast of counterpoint couldprovide the material for a similar approach. In1827 Albert Kiekebusch contributed two po-ems, Der Kontrapunkt and Der endliche Kanon[sic], to Adolf Bernhard Marx’s Berliner allge-meine musikalische Zeitung. Der Kontrapunktis of particular interest. It draws explicitly onBaroque images and allegory, yet develops themin ways that undermine the stasis of the alle-gory:

Counterpoint“What is it?” ask many tongues,

Yet it is for them an incomprehensible word,Even if the master, thoroughly permeated by it,Rips aside the curtain that shields their eyes.For it has sprung from higher being,And no human being arrives at its holy placeIf he has not first strengthened his soul,And anointed himself with the oil of true

wisdom.

“What is it?” That is known above all bythose

To whom is directed the high master’s wordAnd whom the Lord, according to his pleasure,Illuminated with the light of his wisdom.Her foot steps out into the richly decorated hallsAnd she looks to them, full of confidence,She who is eternally enthroned in the eternal

clarity of the starsAnd who hands the wreath of truth delicately

down.

There the spirit looks at her on her throne,The body only measures his space;She carries the sevenfold (*) transfigured crown,Just as he reveals the eternal dream of life:Of the pain of life, of the lot of man to be

scornedHe gives proof on the hem of his gown,For just as misfortune and pain can turn,So he can be turned away.

53“Bey einem so schnellen, unaufhörlich scheinendenWechsel der Empfindungen, bey einer so unaufhaltsamvorüberrauschenden und dahinschwindenden Menge vonEindrücken, bey so geschwinden gleichförmigen (aber dochungewohnten) Bewegungen, weiß die Einbildungskraftweder Anfang, noch Ende zu fassen, sich nirgends fest zuhalten: dieser hinreißende Strom der Veränderung hat etwasFurchtbares, ist zugleich bald ein Bild der Flüchtigkeit desLebens und der drohenden Macht der Natur, bald ein Bildder Ewigkeit, und erfüllt die Seele, wenn sie sich dabeydoch ermannt und durch Vernunft über die Gewalt bloßerErscheinungen erhebt, mit erhabenen Empfindungen.”Christian Friedrich Michaelis, Ueber den Geist der Ton-kunst und andere Schriften, ed. Lothar Schmidt (Chemnitz:G. Schröder, 1997), p. 169. The essay appeared in the Mon-atsschrift für Deutsche.54Michaelis drew his psychology of the sublime from Kant.For an analysis of the stages involved in Kant’s theory ofsublimity, see Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime:Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 23–24.



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Let now the layfolk say what they say,To us it is all the same. We are shielded!Let all without fear dare us with the masses,Who once listened to us, yes, only to us.On his wings he will one day carry usTo her, to her, the sister unscathed,There, only she alone will speak her voice,There, only he alone will rule.

(*) Following Jakob Böhm. According to his theo-sophical point of view, music will be transfiguredsevenfold. [Footnote in original.]

Der KontrapunktWas er wohl sei—das fragen viele Zungen,

Doch ist’s für sie ein unverständlich Wort,Wenn auch der Meister, stark von ihm

durchdrungen,Vor ihren Augen reifst den Vorhang fort.Denn aus dem höhern Sein ist er entsprungen,Und kommt kein Mensch zu seinem heil’gen

OrtEr hab’ zuvor gestärket seine Seele,Und sich gesalbt mit rechter Weisheit Oele.

Was er wohl sei—das wissen die vor allenAn die des hohen Meisters Wort gericht’t,Und die der Herr, nach seinem WohlgefallenUmleuchtete mit seiner Weisheit Licht.Ihr Fuss betritt die reichgeschmückten HallenUnd auf sie schauet Sie voll Zuversicht,Die ewig thront in ew’ger SternenklarheitUnd reicht hernieder mild den Kranz der

Wahrheit.

Dort schauet Sie der Geist auf ihrem Throne,Der Körper nur ermisset seinen Raum;Sie trägt die siebenfach (*) verklärte Krone,Wie er enthüllt des Lebens ew’gen Traum:Des Lebens Schmerz, des Menschen Loos zum

HohneGiebt er Beweis an seines Kleides Saum,Denn wie sich wenden Unglück und

Beschwerden,So auch kann er von uns gewendet werden.

Lass denn die Laien sagen, was sie sagen,Uns sei es alles gleich, wir sind bewährt!Lasst All’ getrost uns durch die Menge wagen,Die einstens doch auf uns, auf uns nur hört.Auf seinen Flügeln wird er einst uns tragenZu Ihr, zu Ihr, der Schwester unversehrt,Dort wird nur Sie allein die Stimme führen,Dort wird nur einzig er allein regieren.55

(*) Nach Jakob Böhme. Seiner theosophischenEinsicht zufolge wird die Musik siebenfachverklärt werden.

Kiekebusch used religious imagery to paintcounterpoint as an entity beyond human ken.Whereas the specialist might be guided by ittoward unimaginable riches, the layperson willfind it ever strange. With these observationsKiekebusch took up familiar topoi from theRomantic aesthetics of counterpoint. They hadbeen made popular among musically educatedmembers of the middle classes, above all byE. T. A. Hoffmann.56 Counterpoint has a revela-tory power for those willing to contemplate it.

In positioning counterpoint as revelatory,however, the poem engages a symbolic mode ofinterpretation that obscures the revelation andsubverts the allegory associated with it. Thedebt Romantic music critics owed to sixteenth-and seventeenth-century religious writers iswell known.57 What is significant about thisparticular poem is the way traditional allego-ries are rendered opaque through suggestion.Initially the poem captures the elusiveness ofcounterpoint through allegory. Counterpoint ispersonified, outfitted with religious pathos, andpositioned as an entity that guides the special-ist musician but remains veiled to the unknow-ing masses. As the poem continues, however,the web of personal pronouns grows ever denserand ever more difficult to penetrate. Counter-point (der Contrapunkt) is masculine, as are anumber of other agents throughout the poem:the Lord, the Spirit, the body. It is often diffi-cult to ascertain to what or to whom the mas-culine pronouns (er, sein) refer, but study (andtranslation) can clarify their referents, perhapsmore than Kiekebusch would have liked. Whenthe feminine pronoun ihr and sie arrive in lines13–14, allegory turns toward symbol, for the

55Albert Kiekebusch, “Der Kontrapunkt,” Berliner allge-meine musikalische Zeitung 4 (1827), 316 (emphases inoriginal).

56See, for example, Kreisler’s performance of Bach’s“Goldberg” Variations in the first of Hoffmann’sKreisleriana. E. T. A. Hoffmann, Fantasie- und Nacht-stücke, 6th edn. (Düsseldorf: Artemis & Winkler, 1996),pp. 27–32; Hoffmann, Musical Writings, pp. 81–87.57Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 88–102;Mark Evan Bonds, “Idealism and the Aesthetics of Instru-mental Music at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century,”Journal of the American Musicological Society 50 (1997),387–420.



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referent of the pronoun is not named. Capitali-zation and emphasis reinforce the centrality ofthe female figure even as her name is withheld.The interpreter is left to consider the possibili-ties.

The plurality of those possibilities is a signthat the poem has undermined the allegoricalmode with which it began. There are at leasttwo lines of significance, though the lack of areferent for the feminine pronoun leaves morelines open. The first is suggested by indicationswithin the text of the poem. The heavy use ofChristological images suggests that the VirginMary is the presiding figure. The second pros-pect is musical and is named by Kiekebusch’sfootnote: die Musik.

The doctrinally specific implication (the Vir-gin Mary) is rendered opaque at the end of thepoem with the invocation of a sister-brotherrelationship between feminine and masculinepronouns. The Virgin Mary cannot be a sisterto any of the possible male protagonists. Butalthough the masculine and feminine pronounsrefer best to “counterpoint” and “music,” re-spectively, they never entirely exclude the stan-dard characters of religious doctrine. The ambi-guities are especially rich in the final two lines.Because “voice” (Stimme) has both linguisticand musical meaning, the lines could refer tothe technical relationship between counterpoint(masculine) and music (feminine): music speaks,but counterpoint rules her speaking. Or thelines could refer to the function of counter-point in the training of the expert musician:counterpoint rules the path to the metaphysi-cal utterances of which music is capable.

As to the footnote, it nominally brings greaterclarity to the poem but does not entirely re-solve its symbolic resonances. Not only is itunclear who wished the note printed—the au-thor Albert Kiekebusch or the editor AdolfBernhard Marx—but the clarification offeredby the note does not erase the elusiveness andallusiveness of the play of pronouns. The diffi-culty of interpretation seems to be one of thepoints of the poem, and the explanatory foot-note both simplifies and complicates the pro-cess.

The degree to which the poem strives againstallegory can be seen from a brief comparisonwith the stated mentor, Jakob Böhme. The com-

parison also serves as a reminder of the intel-lectual distance that writers on the arts hadtraveled by the early nineteenth century. Böhme(1575–1624) was a Lutheran mystic influentialon Romantic writers, especially FriedrichSchlegel and Novalis, whom he served prima-rily as an inspiration in their challenge to theboundaries that Kant had placed on metaphysi-cal thought. They did not take Böhme as anexample of how to write or read. When Böhmerevealed transcendent truths, he used the clar-ity of allegory to paint definite pictures. Bou-quet of Jakob Böhme’s Writings, published in1819, begins with an allegory that gives theflavor of the mystic’s writings: “The tower inthe great city of Babel is an image of fallenmortal man who has receded into himself andwho has made the word of God into an idol.”58

While the allegory might be strange, its presen-tation is clear and its meaning is spelled out. Itrequires only the person with proper theologi-cal vision to decipher it—a specialist of thestripe of Böhme himself. Kiekebusch’s Roman-tic mysticism, by contrast, revels in a vague-ness that leaves interpretation open to many,even as it compliments the cohort of interpret-ers by counting them among the initiated.

A Revolution in Method

There are several reasons that German writerson the arts began to insist on the process in-volved in thought and interpretation towardthe end of the eighteenth century. The firstreason is philosophical. Whereas writers on aes-thetics from Alexander Baumgarten onward hadgiven ever greater importance to cognitions ofthe senses, Immanuel Kant decisively changedthe playing field of aesthetics through the rolehe gave to the mind in constituting the frame-work for perception and understanding. Goethe,Schiller, Reinhard, Novalis, the Schlegel broth-ers, and many educated Germans of lesser re-

58“Der Thurm bei der großen Stadt Babel ist ein Bild desabgefallenen irdischen Menschen, der in die Selbstheiteingegangen ist, und das Wort Gottes in ihm zu einemAbgott gemacht hat.” Blumenlese aus Jacob BöhmensSchriften, ed. J. G. Rätze (Leipzig: Hartmann, 1819), p. 1.Accessed through Google Books. I have been unable tofind the discussion of music by Böhme to which the foot-note refers.



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nown reviewed and reworked this “CopernicanRevolution,” as Kant called it.59 The resultswere many, but not least among them was theprominence given the imagination as a produc-tive capacity.60 One found pleasure in the con-templation of an artwork because one’s mindworked in a particular way. An aesthetic idea,Kant wrote, “is that representation of the imagi-nation that incites much thinking, withoutthere being a determinate thought (that is, aconcept) that is adequate to it. As a result, nolanguage fully attains it or makes it intelli-gible.”61 The potential lack of correspondencebetween the imagination and concepts is whatmotivates the processual side of aesthetic ex-perience. Schiller summed up the effect thatKant had had on educated Germans when hewrote that “a revolution in the philosophicalworld has shaken the foundations on whichaesthetics had been based and has thrown theexisting system, if one can call it that, to thedogs.”62

Another reason for the turn toward processin interpretation involves the hardening of thework concept. Allegory had ruled in an erawhen musicians thought primarily about theeffects of music, either through the lens of the

humanist “praise of music” or through that ofa rhetoric of persuasion or affect. Although thesignificance of counterpoint could be ascer-tained as something that existed independentlyof time, its effects were to be discovered in thetime-bound performative practices of musicalproduction and reception. By contrast, by theend of the eighteenth century, artists sought toextricate the work as a conceptual entity fromthese practices of production and reception, inessence to withdraw the work from time. Theflip side of this reification of the work was thatinterpretation itself became more of a process.Musicians strongly oriented toward works pos-ited the work itself as closed and hermetic butfound the process of interpretation fluid.

This separation of reified work and flux ofinterpretation was described by Michaelis inOn the Spirit of Music, with Consideration ofKant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment: An Aes-thetic Essay (1795). Michaelis first noted thatthe imagination could construe an imaginativeentity—“a new world, as it were” (gleichsameine neue Welt)—by construing its sensory ex-periences.63 Like other writers of the late eigh-teenth century, he used the philosophical con-cept of alternative worlds to conceptualize theself-contained work.64 This act of imaginationcould be followed by a second stage in whichthe imagination was set alight by vague butsignificant ideas: “A piece of music comes tolife when the energy and the characteristic qual-ity in the harmony and melody awakenunnamable feelings and ideas [Gefühle undVorstellungen] in us and, as it were, carry us upinto a celestial sphere.” Finally, Michaelis en-thused about possible interpretations and therange of moods that such ideas produce. “Asingle expression in the poet’s language, a singlefacial trait in a painting or a sculpture, or asingle tone in music can awaken an infinite

59Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, I, 27 (Akademie AusgabeB, xvi–xvii).60Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity from Kantto Nietzsche (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), pp. 1–7.61“Unter einer ästhetischen Idee aber verstehe ich diejenigeVorstellung der Einbildungskraft, die viel zu denkenveranlaßt, ohne daß ihr doch irgendein bestimmterGedanke, d. i. Begriff, adäquat sein kann, die folglich keineSprache völlig erreicht und verständlich machen kann.”Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. Karl Vorländer(Hamburg: Meiner, 1990), pp. 167–68 (§49).62Letter of 9 February 1793 to Friedrich Christian vonSchleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg. “Die Revo-lution in der philosophischen Welt hat den Grund, aufdem die Aesthetick aufgeführt war, erschüttert, und dasbisherige System derselben, wenn man ihn anders diesenNahmen geben kann, über den Haufen geworfen.” FriedrichSchiller, Werke: Nationalausgabe, ed. Julius Petersen, etal. (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1940–), XXVI,184. For discussions of Kant’s influence on music criti-cism, especially with respect to the work concept, seeWilhelm Seidel, “Zwischen Immanuel Kant und dermusikalischen Klassik: Die Ästhetik des musikalischenKunstwerks um 1800,” in Das musikalische Kunstwerk:Geschichte, Ästhetik, Theorie: Festschrift Carl Dahlhauszum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Hermann Danuser, et al. (Laaber:Laaber, 1988), pp. 67–84; Lothar Schmidt, Organische Formin der Musik: Stationen eines Begriffs 1795–1850 (Kassel:Bärenreiter, 1990).

63“Die Einbildungskraft schafft sich gleichsam eine neueWelt durch analogische zusammensetzung, Vergrößerungoder Verringerung und manchfaltige Abänderung derGegenstände der wirklichen Natur.” Michaelis, “Ueber denGeist der Tonkunst: Mit Rücksicht auf Kants Kritik derästhetischen Urtheilskraft. Ein ästhetischer Versuch,” inSchriften, p. 7.64Dahlhaus, “‘Eine abgesonderte Welt für sich selbst,’” inKlassische und romantische Musikästhetik (Laaber: Laaber,1988), pp. 144–49.



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variety of the most interesting ideas and canbring forth the most affecting moods.”65

Michaelis was after something difficult todescribe, and once again it is possible to readhis meaning from the slippages in his language.The slippages arise from the complexity of theinterpretive process he wished to describe. Hesays first that ideas cannot be captured in words.They are unnamable. Then he describes theirinfinite variety. The slip from elusiveness toinfinity is a token of the directional processinvolved in symbolic interpretation. Michaelisseems to have two types of ideas in mind. Thefirst is encoded in the musical work and cannotbe consummated by language. The second ismore precise but is of a second order. Becauseit only approximates the first type of idea, it isendlessly replaceable by other second-orderideas. Taking flight from a significance divinedrather than defined, the imagination is left towander wide fields.

To summarize, there are two homologies in-volved in the relationship between the key-board fugue and time. There is a homologybetween the techniques of fugue and the inter-pretive method used to find metaphysical sig-nificance in counterpoint generally, and thereis a homology between these two issues takentogether and the historical sensibilities of theearly eighteenth and the early nineteenth cen-turies, respectively. If the keyboard fugue al-ways tended toward the cyclical, it could none-theless be invested with varying degrees of te-leological drive, especially once German com-posers began to stage dramatic transformationsor events in order to suit the nineteenth-cen-

tury taste for teleology. But no matter where afugue stood on the continuum between stasisand flux, composers were only partly respon-sible for the significance read into their works.Writers on counterpoint on both sides of thecentury spoke of counterpoint and fugue interms of transcendence, but their ways of think-ing about such transcendence were quite differ-ent. The practices of interpretation were at-tuned to the temporal character of the music.The favor shown by Bach to cyclical, time-attenuating musical processes was matched bythe favor lavished by his contemporaries on theprecisions and objective analyses of allegory.By contrast, Schumann presents a successionof states through which time seems to moveforward. The increasing popularity of teleologi-cal drives in his time was underpinned by theflexible vagaries of the symbol. Schumannstaged a process that would overwhelm his lis-teners, fill them with sublime sentiments, andleave them with intimations of eternity andother transcendentals that were powerfulin proportion to their vagueness.

Abstract.Throughout the history of Western music, musi-cians have almost invariably discussed the keyboardfugue and other extreme forms of polyphony as signsof something that transcends human subjectivity.Despite the persistence of this critical topos, musi-cians shifted their approach to it around the begin-ning of the nineteenth century. The shift involvedboth a change in the technique of counterpoint and achange in the way counterpoint was interpreted.Composers sought to invest the fugue with a newdramatic and teleological thrust suitable to moderntimes, and critically minded musicians changed theirinterpretive method so as to emphasize the passageof time. Whereas musicians of the early eighteenthcentury read counterpoint and the fugue allegori-cally and annulled time through the conceptual pre-cision of the allegorical image, musicians of the lateeighteenth and early nineteenth centuries read thefugue symbolically and worked time into their in-terpretive process. In both eras, the practice of inter-pretation coincided with and affected the reading ofthe genre’s temporality. Key words: fugue, allegory,symbol, Robert Schumann, Johann Sebastian Bach,Christian Friedrich Michaelis, Immanuel Kant

65“Ein Tonstück ist vom Geist ästhetischer Ideen belebt,wenn die Energie und das Charakteristische in Harmonieund Melodie unnennbare Gefühle und Vorstellungen derEinbildungskraft in uns wecken und uns gleichsam in eineüberirdische Sphäre emporschwingen. Ein einziger Aus-druck in der Sprache des Dichters, ein einziger Gesichtszugin dem Gemälde oder in der Bildsäule, ein einziger Ton inder Musik, kann eine zahllose Menge der interessantestenVorstellungen wecken und die rührendeste Stimmunghervorbringen.” Michaelis, Schriften, pp. 7–8 (emphasesadded).

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Time and the Keyboard Fugue - Cardiff Universityorca.cf.ac.uk/15032/1/Chapin 2010.pdf · Time and...

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Transcript of Time and the Keyboard Fugue - Cardiff Universityorca.cf.ac.uk/15032/1/Chapin 2010.pdf · Time and...