A fugue is music written for several imitative parts which, entering at staggered stages, join together to create a harmonic whole.
Since the Middle Ages, and the first flowering of notated music, composers have striven beyond simple tune-plus-accompaniment.
The result was counterpoint: a texture in which voices interweave like the strands in a cable, or pull against each other like the arc and cord of a fully tensed bow.
The crowning achievement was Fugue. Think of the tune Frère Jacques. If you assemble several voices, and get the singers to stagger their entries, this tune combines with itself to produce satisfying harmonies, yet all the while each voice remains melodic – no musical line is simply subservient to the melody on top. This device is called ‘Canon’.
How a fugue moves the game on from a canon
Now imagine that, the First Voice having repeated the phrase ‘Frère Jaques’ and moved on to the higher ‘dormez-vous?’, the Second Voice comes in with the ‘Frère Jacques’ on a different note: say, a fifth higher. In other words, Voice Two starts on the note that ends the phrase ‘dormez-vous?’.
The combination works well enough for a phrase or two, but then the problems begin. You might have to stretch or contract one of the lines to get a satisfactory fit.
And if you want to bring in another voice, singing ‘Frère Jaques’ at the original pitch, you might have to add a few extra notes – a little ‘coda’ – to bring the harmony back to where we started.
Now you have something like the beginning of a fugue. The voices enter one by one, broadly imitating each other, but at alternating pitches: home-note/fifth/home-note… and so on, depending on the number of voices.
The ingenuity comes in the stretching, bending, contracting of ‘Frère Jacques’ (the fugal ‘subject’) and ‘dormez-vous?’ (the ‘countersubject’) to make them fit harmoniously and interestingly with each other in this new harmonic scheme.
Each voice is ‘first amongst equals’
Imagine, then, a substantial piece in which the subject, countersubject, plus all the contracted, stretched and bent versions of both, plus the tail-pieces, are combined and recombined, in a regular, carefully contrasted formal scheme, to create a dynamic texture in which each voice is ‘first amongst equals’: each part formed from the same basic material, yet each making its own independent contribution to the musical argument.
This, in basic terms, is Fugue. For the composer it’s perhaps the supreme intellectual challenge. Yet as Bach above all showed, it can also express a staggering variety of moods and characters. For the listener it can be pure joy.
Most famous fugues in classical music
Some of classical music’s best known fugues include
Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier. Bach’s two-book set consists of 48 preludes and fugues, each set in a different key. Not for nothing is Bach considered the ‘grand master of the fugue’.
Haydn: Sun Quartets. Three of Haydn’s 1772 set of string quartets known as the Sun Quartets have fugal finales.
Mozart: Symphony No. 41 ‘Jupiter’. Perhaps the most famous fugal finale in all of classical music – a dazzling feat of compositional mastery in which no fewer than five themes are woven around each other. Simply, one of the most exciting and cathartic experiences in music.
- We named the ‘Jupiter’ one of the greatest symphonies of all time
Beethoven: Symphony No. 9. The finale of Beethoven‘s last and perhaps greatest symphony includes two double fugues.
- Beethoven featured high in our list of the greatest composers of all time
Shostakovich: 24 Preludes and Fugues. One of the great works of 20th-century piano music, Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues follow the Bach model in presenting one prelude, followed by a fugue, in each of the 24 major and minor keys. They’re a wonderful mix of technical wizardry and emotional heft, while also drawing from the deep well of Baroque music.
- ‘When a man is in despair, it means he still believes in something’: 11 memorable Shostakovich quotes
- Five of the best Shostakovich conductors
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