You bet your booties I am. Here's the theme.
Hello there, I'm Peter Shickley, and this is Shickley Mix, a program dedicated to the proposition that all musics are created equal. Or as Duke Ellington put it, if it sounds good, it is good.
And if it is good, there's a good chance that it costs money. Fortunately, our bills are paid by this radio station right here on your radio dial.
For 80 years after he died, Johann Sebastian Bach was pretty much forgotten as a composer, except by a few of the cognoscenti.
The cognoscenti are people who know what words like cognoscenti mean.
And yet, 275 years after Bach died, there was a blind man who stood on the sidewalk of 6th Avenue at about 53rd Street in Manhattan.
His name was Moondog, he wore Viking garb, and he sold copies of his latest poetry and music.
At that time, judging by the samples I bought, his poetry consisted of aphoristic couplets, and his music was fugues in the style of Bach.
Old Johann Sebastian has been one of the most influential composers in the history of Western music. Why did his star fall so low in the second half of the 18th century? Three reasons come immediately to mind.
First, it wasn't until the beginning of the 19th century that people were interested in any dead composers.
Second reason was the rise of opera, which tended towards easily graspable melodies over simple, unobtrusive accompaniments.
And last, more and more amateurs were playing music, which resulted in a demand for pieces that didn't exceed modest technical capabilities.
Almost all of Bach's students were young men who went on to become, or at least aspired to become, professional musicians. Whereas Mozart and Beethoven spent most of their time teaching dilettantes.
Some of them not without talent, but dilettantes nonetheless. Bach's kind of music was widely regarded by then as old-fashioned, stuffy, and learned.
Difficult to write, difficult to play, and difficult to listen to. The epitome of that kind of music, it was felt, was the fugue.
A piece featuring more or less strict imitation by all the voices of the texture of a short, striking, melodic idea called a subject that is used throughout the piece, appearing in a way that is not necessarily a music. The music is a piece of music that is used throughout the piece, appearing in a way that is not necessarily a music.
It is performed in a fairly standard variety of keys. Today we're going to talk about the adventures of the fugue in the century or so after Bach's death. But first, let's set the stage with one of the best-known examples from the hand of the master.
Glenn Gould, playing the Second Fugue from the well-tempered clavier by Johann Sebastian Bach.
While that's fresh in your mind, listen to the beginning of a Mozart piano sonata, and you'll see what I mean about the simplifying influence of opera and amateurs.
Hey, compared to the Bach, it's simple to the point of being simple-minded. That was Walter Gieseking playing the opening of the world's most famous piano sonata. Well, maybe second most famous, after the moonlight.
Now, a towering figure can be a hard act to follow. And the virtues of Bach's fugues are so powerful that many, if not most, later composers have found it hard to ignore the fugue entirely.
But they have also found that writing a fugue that doesn't sound like warmed-over Bach isn't that easy. That's why today's show is called Fugues. Can't live with them, can't live without them.
Now, I have to admit to a personal bias here. A pet peeve of mine is 19th or 20th century orchestral pieces that build to a climax,
and then all the instruments drop out except the violas who go... ...
Much of the composer's unique personality drops away, and we're back in Bachville. Most great composers found a way to transcend the problem.
But they had to wrestle with it. It wasn't easy, even for them. In our first suite today, we can hear three of them working it out. I call it the Bach-on-my-back suite. And it lasts about nine minutes.
Remember the Bach fugue? Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do. Well, the first fugue of this suite was written more than 200 years later, and yet...
Beautiful ending. That was Mendelssohn. Three composers writing with Bach looking over their shoulder. We began with a fugue in A minor by Shostakovich, from his Preludes and Fugues for Pianos.
piano. And you know, when I say Bach looking over the shoulder, I should point out that this is sometimes intentional. Shostakovich started his set of Preludes and Fugues after visiting Leipzig
to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Bach's death. And so he went back and started a set. And I also have to say that they're not all that Bach-y. I mean, nobody would mistake that for Bach,
but certainly the articulation is quite Bach-y. There are others, there's a beautiful one in F sharp minor that don't sound that Bach-y at all. And then we had a brief excerpt from the last
movement of Brahms' first piano concerto. That was Andras Schiff with Sir George Schulte conducting
the Vienna Philharmonic. And that's an example not of a fugue, but a fugal section where it,
to me, suddenly sounds Bach-y in a way that, to my ear, doesn't fit with the very romantic stuff going on around it.
And then finally, Frederick Moyer playing a fugue in E minor, opus 35, number one,
by Mendelssohn, who, of course, was very much part of the Bach revival. He conducted the first
performance of the St. Matthew Passion after Bach's death. And that really sort of began the resurrection of Bach as a great composer.
The piece is a fascinating one. It sort of starts quite Bach-y, and then it gets more and more 19th century. But then finally that Bach chorale comes in in the right hand, and we sort of
remember where we started. And the writing is very pianistic, but also quite orchestral, which is typical of a lot of the piano writing of the 19th century.
I'm Peter Shickley. The program is Shickley Mix from PRI, Public Radio International. I mentioned earlier that there were a few people who knew at least some of Bach's music during the
period between his death and 1750. And Mendelssohn's revival of the St. Matthew Passion in 1829. And one of these people was Beethoven, who owned a copy of the well-tempered Clavier, and during a part of his life played
something from it every day. Another was Mozart. The brilliant young prodigy, along with Bach's own son, Johann Christian, was very much a part of the Rococo reaction against the Baroque style.
But at a certain point, both Mozart and Haydn came to feel a need to incorporate into their own style the existing style of the Baroque style. And they did. And they did. And they did. And they did. And they
counterpoint. It turned out to be one of those things, like combining jazz and classical music during the 1960s, that is easier said than done, or at least pulled off effectively. I read somewhere
that at no time during his creative life did Mozart leave as many pieces unfinished as he did while he was grappling with this problem. He arranged for string trio and added preludes to
some fugues by another, more conservative son of Johann Sebastian, Wilhelm Friedmannbach. He wrote some separate fugues that are quite Bach-y indeed. Then he wrote fugal movements of larger pieces,
like the string quartet finale we're about to hear. You wouldn't actually confuse the subject of this fugue with one written by Bach, but it isn't a tune out of Eine kleine Nachtmusik either.
Towards the end, by the way, you can hear a common fugal technique called stretto. That's when the subject piles up on itself, each statement starting before the previous one has finished.
The Amadeus Quartet, playing the last movement of Mozart's string quartet in F, Cursal 168. A nice scratchy little piece, sounds like a hen convention.
Eventually, Mozart achieved a synthesis of Bach's style and the more operatic late 18th century style, not by writing a new kind of fugue, but by mixing fugal elements with melody and
accompaniment elements. The finale of the later quartet we're about to hear begins with a fugue
subject, and there's a complete fugal exposition of that, all four instruments entering one after
another with the subject in different keys, after which we plunge directly into a completely non-contrapuntal section, a virtuoso melody with a few chords of accompaniment.
Then we modulate to another key and have a fugue interface with the first chord. have another, different fugue subject. One. Now that subject could almost literally have been
written by Bach. There's an exposition of that subject involving all four instruments, and then guess what? It turns out that the second subject fits with the first one as a counter melody.
We've got a double fugue situation going on here, but not for long. Soon we're into a new songy
section. Now that part is straight opera. It's the soprano singing a melody while the orchestra
goes... Next comes a development section that deals with a seemingly unimportant connecting
figure... subject. Then we get the virtuoso fiddle tune, the two fugal subjects together. We're into a recapitulation.
The opera aria, some more fooling around with the connecting figure, a stretto, the word means narrow actually, the distances between the entries are tightened, and a wonderful soft, almost
throwaway ending. Did you follow that? Well, let's let Wolfgang say it in his own way.
Once again, the Amadeus Quartet. And that was the last movement of Mozart's Quartet in G, K-387.
And one thing I might mention is that one of the ways in which that's also different from a straight fugue is that the two halves of the movement are written to be repeated. Now the Amadeus didn't
take the repeat, so you couldn't hear that. But originally in the way Mozart wrote it, the little da-da-da-da-da-da thing goes back to the beginning. Both halves are repeated, and that is something
that is, I think, universally true of fugues, that there are no repeats in fugues. Fugues are through composed forms. I was thinking about this while we were listening to it. If you wanted to write a new kind of fugue,
see the fugal stuff in that is fairly boh-ey. If you wanted to write a new kind of fugue, he could have written a fugue on that second theme, on that aria theme. Not the second one, I guess a third. He could write a fugue that goes...
The second violin... The cello... That would be a completely different kind of non-Bach-y fugue.
But Mozart didn't take that route. He took the sort of Bach-y stuff, mixing it, and doing it beautifully. To me, more successfully than in the Brahms piano concerto that we heard earlier,
mixing it with non-contrapuntal kind of stuff. And now it's tidbit time in Old Fugue Town. And we're going to hear another example of the genre composed a couple of centuries after Bach,
but this one is definitely a tribute to the old guy. This is one of those, what if he were alive now, speculations.
Mr. Bach Goes to Town That was Benny Goodman and his band playing Henry Brandt's arrangement of Alec Templeton's Stretto in that one.
Personally, I'm Peter Shickley, and Shickley Mix is the show. From PRI, Public Radio International. As I said before, fugues continue to be written to the present day.
In fact, I'd be willing to bet that at this very moment, someone will be writing to me. Somewhere in the world, somebody's composing a fugue. But it seems to me that Beethoven was the last great composer
for whom the fugue was a central and invigorating force. There are so many vastly varied examples we could hear, but we'll have to be satisfied with one.
First, however, I'd like to present a little display of three different imitative procedures used by Beethoven. I call this the Working My Way Back to Fugue Suite.
That's his in. I'm working my way back to fugue, babe With a burning love inside
As a matter of fact, Beethoven may have cared more about the fugue than he did about any woman. Irrelevant speculation alert. Anyway, I don't mean to imply any chronological progression here.
This is an achronological pseudo-historical survey. In the first excerpt, Beethoven says, Beethoven sets up very short melodic phrases for imitation, and each instrument begins on the same note as the previous,
so that it's very much like the points of imitation in a Renaissance work. A mass by Palestrina, for instance. And that was, I think, an intentional reference on Beethoven's part.
The second excerpt features fugal expositions alternating with completely non-contrapuntal material, as in the Mozart movement we just heard. And the last is a full-blown fugue. But, and I'm really very sorry,
we don't have time for the whole thing. This is a fugue that nobody would even begin to mistake for one by Bach. The Working My Way Back to Fugue Suite, in spite of its funny title,
contains about nine of the most serious and exalted minutes of music ever written.
The Working My Way Back to Fugue Suite began and ended with the playing of the Wehr Quartet. First, they played the beginning of the third movement of Beethoven's quartet in A minor, Opus 132,
the Heilige Dank Gesang, Song of Thanks, when he recovered from an illness. Then we heard the trio of the second movement of the Archduke Trio, also by Beethoven, played by the Suk Trio.
And then finally, the opening of Beethoven's string quartet in C-sharp minor, Opus 131. We heard about half of that fugue.
We're going to end with one of the most amazing fugues ever written. This is the work of a crazy man. A brilliant, inspired, crazy man,
whose head, by the end of his life, really was in the clouds. Lucky thing, too, because he saw things the rest of us can't see, and he told us about them. Those of you who have been with this show for a while
know that I don't lapse into language like that very often. But I'm telling you, I can't do that. I can't believe this piece. The last movement of Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata
begins with a slow section that we, for reasons of time, will have to forego. So we'll be fading into the beginning of the fugue. And the first statement of the subject is a little confusing
because there's sort of a leftover bit of left-hand music that obscures it somewhat. But there's no obscuring the power of what follows. Fasten your seatbelts, folks.
I'll see you in a little under ten minutes.
Maurizio Pollini playing the fugue at the end of the Hammerklavier Sonata by Beethoven, Op. 106. What can one say but, wow.
That's Sickly Mix for this week. Our program is made possible with funds provided by this radio station and its members. Thank you, members. We'll tell you in a moment how you can get an official playlist
of all the music on today's program with record numbers and everything. Just refer to the program number. This is program 53. And this is Peter Schickely saying goodbye and reminding you that it don't mean a thing
if it ain't got that certain je ne sais quoi. You're looking good. See you next week.
If you'd like a copy of that playlist I mentioned, send a stamped, self-addressed envelope to Schickely Mix. That's S-C-H-I-C-K-E-L-E, Schickely Mix. Care of Public Radio International.
100 North 6th Street, Suite 900A, Minneapolis, MN 55403.
PRI.