The Joys of Fugue

This short book attempts one of the most difficult enterprises in criticism: to define in words the quality of musical experience, and to support the definitions with accurate analysis of the music. Kerman approaches his task with humility, seeking a balance between the wildly subjective pronouncements of some nineteenth- and early twentieth-century critics and the impersonal, jargon-ridden analysis favoured by contemporary writers on music. Practitioners of this type of criticism are rare, and Kerman is one of the best. In accessible prose, his straightforward but sophisticated musical analysis illuminates a broad aesthetic perspective throughout his many books on various musical topics. I can particularly recommend his Opera as Drama, first published in 1956 and reissued in 2005 in a new edition. With passion and insight, it examines specific operas from Monteverdi through Stravinsky, revealing music's ability to articulate character, action, and emotional climate. Kerman risks some bold assertions, claiming for example that sending Don Giovanni to Hell at the end of the opera is contrary to all of Mozart's operatic instincts, which always dramatise human relationships, and blaming Da Ponte for failing to provide a rationale for the action. Such observations, backed by solid and illuminating musical analysis, make this a lively and thought-provoking book.

The Art of Fugue is more measured in its opinions, as befits the topic, and it is definitely a book to be studied. Kerman expects his readers to mine their insights from the music itself, and to that end provides a CD with printable scores of all sixteen of the works discussed in the book and recordings of five of them. (Why not all sixteen, since readers who don't play themselves will certainly need to obtain recordings?) At a minimum, the reader should be able and willing to follow a score while listening to the music, and appreciation can only be enhanced by the ability to play the fugues, or at least parts of them, on the keyboard. Substantial technical knowledge, however, is not required, since Kerman provides an excellent glossary for essential terms. Each chapter is a self-contained essay on a single work; after the first two chapters, which discuss the first two fugues in Book I of the Well-Tempered Clavier and provide an introduction to the principles of fugue, they may be read in any order. In addition to several fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Kerman includes an organ chorale fugue, one from an English Suite, two from the Art of Fugue, and others, all ordered according to key like the forty-eight preludes and fugues in the Well-Tempered Clavier. There is a refreshing absence of didactic purpose behind the selection; no point is being made other than to offer a variety of fugues and 'to convey something of what makes them particularly beautiful, powerful, intriguing, witty, or moving' (p. xvii).

Kerman acknowledges his debt to Tovey for the analytical method of narrating musical events bar by bar (satirised by Peter Schickele in the hilarious PDQ Bach recording of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony with football-style commentary). This method is generally out of fashion, but, in addition to being more accessible to non-professional musicians than are the more graphic methods of much contemporary analysis, it allows the writer to move from technical to interpretative commentary with ease. For example, after demonstrating how Bach builds musical tension from the terse, chromatic motif which begins the five-part fugue in C# minor, Kerman discusses the tributes paid to it by Mozart, Beethoven, and nineteenth-century critics, and the nature of its appeal for them: 'When this music is not haunted and driven it is violently disrupted, as at bars 66 and 94. One does not associate dramatic gestures of this kind with Bach as a writer of fugues. They resonate well with the Romantic spirit' (p. 32). Elsewhere, he identifies the source of the élan and humour in the Gigue from the third English Suite: its subject's 'free...