36 Fugues (Reicha) - General Information

General Information

In Über das neue Fugensystem Reicha outlines his idea of the fugue as a form. To him, the characteristics required were the following:

• the theme must appear in all voices, voices entering one by one,
• throughout the fugue the texture and character must remain properly contrapuntal,
• all musical ideas should be derived from the subject alone.

The standard rule of answering the subject at the dominant did not matter to Reicha, and he argues that any scale degree can be used (for example, the subject is answered at the tritone in Fugue No. 20). He also dismisses limitations on the nature of the fugue's subjects, such as obligatory non-periodic structure (one of the subjects of Fugue No. 18 consists of a single note repeated) and a maximum span of a ninth (the subject borrowed from Mozart, in Fugue No. 7, has a span of more than two octaves). Finally, in some fugues of the cycle, Reicha experiments with the structure of the form by adding introductory sections (Fugue No. 27) or alterating between two different forms of texture (Fugue No. 14).

Although most fugues employ a single subject, some are different: six fugues employ two subjects (nos. 4, 13, 18, 31, 32, 34), fugue number 30 has three and fugue number 15 has six. Of the 36 fugues, 6 use subjects from other composers. These are the following:

• Fugue No. 3 in F minor uses the primary theme from the first movement of Joseph Haydn's String Quartet No. 23 in F Minor, Op. 20, No. 5
• Fugue No. 5 in G major uses the subject of Johann Sebastian Bach's G major fugue from Book II of the Well-Tempered Clavier, BWV 884/2
• Fugue No. 7 in D major uses the theme that starts Mozart's Haffner Symphony, K. 385
• Fugue No. 9 in G minor uses the subject of Domenico Scarlatti's Cat's Fugue, Kk. 30/ L. 499
• Fugue No. 14, fuga-fantasia, uses the subject of Girolamo Frescobaldi's Recercar Cromatico post il credo from the second Mass of Fiori musicali, Missa Degli Apostoli.
• Fugue No. 15 is built on six subjects, one of which is a theme from Handel's oratorio Israel in Egypt, namely the line "I will sing unto the Lord" from the first chorus of the second part, "Moses and the children of Israel ".