Chapter One - Fugue and Its Discontents

Summary

Charles tells this story, I think: as Rossini and Meyerbeer are watching thecortège go by at Halévy’s funeral, withMeyerbeer’s funeral march, Rossini says sadly, “How muchbetter if you had died and Halévy had written the funeralmarch.” Rather than another analysis of another Bach fugue by thepresent writer, the world would be better off with a reprint of CharlesRosen’s 1997 review of Bach and Patterns ofInvention by Laurence Dreyfus. This long review does more thanset down and acknowledge Dreyfus’s accomplishment in a remarkablycomprehensive way, given the space that would have been available. It isalso one of those reviews in which the writer takes the opportunity to moveon from the book at hand and develop serious ideas of his own. Rosen makespoints in the piece that I haven’t seen made anywhere else, or madebetter. I quote liberally in reference to just one such point:

The expressive power of Bach’s music has several sources.…Most important of all, perhaps, is his understanding of emotionalpossibilities inherent in counterpoint—that is,in the way one voice can imitate another, in the dramatic effects thatcan be drawn from a melody inverted or played against itself, and alsofrom the subtle ways the harmonic implications of a motif can beradically altered when it is played with another motif of differentcharacter.

Picking up on this later in his review, Rosen writes that in Bach’stime

Bach’s extraordinary craft had been generally recognizedinternationally by professionals: the expressive force of this craft hadbeen perceived only dimly. The virtuosity of his constructions literallyobscured their affective power. … Bach had transformed andmagnified the latent expressive capacities of the most esotericachievements of the ancient contrapuntal art. …

But for later generations,

Recognitions of his achievement now became official. It was, however,only the educational keyboard works of the final three decades of hislife that were the basis at first for the new evaluation. At last theextraordinary beauty of these works was perceived as well as thetremendous skill. … In this sense it is not the Romantic movementthat salvaged the work of Bach, but his work that helped form Romanticaesthetics, as musicians who wanted to assert the independent dignity,and justify the complexity, of their art gradually realized throughEurope that his work could be a model and an inspiration.