“What art owes to Bach is to the musical world hardly less than what a religion owes to its founder,” said Robert Schumann. (Eric Frederick Jensen)
Championed in part by Mendelssohn, the first half of the 19th century saw a revival of interest in the music of J.S. Bach. Nine days after their wedding, Robert and Clara Schumann began an extensive study of Bach’s counterpoint together. The occasion was documented by Clara in a September 21, 1840 entry in the couple’s marriage diary:
…We have started with the Fugues of Bach [from The Well-Tempered Clavier—MR]; Robert marks those places where the theme always returns—studying these fugues is really quite interesting and gives me more pleasure each day. Robert reprimanded me very strongly; I had doubled one place in octaves, and thus impermissibly added a fifth voice to the four-voice texture. He was right to denounce this, but it pained me not to have sensed it myself.
The influence of Bach can be heard throughout Schumann’s Second Symphony, written five years later. The Symphony’s opening introduction, with its mystical trumpet call, resembles a Bach chorale prelude. The second trio section from the following Scherzo is built on the B-A-C-H motif, a musical cryptogram translating the letters of the name into musical notation, based on the German alphabet: (B-flat-A-C-B). Even the Symphony’s sensuous, longing Adagio, the epitome of full-blown Romanticism, drifts off, in one passage, into Bach-like counterpoint.
Numerous composers, from Schumann, Liszt, and Brahms, to Schoenberg, Webern, and Schnittke, wrote music based on the motif. Bach, himself, used the motif so frequently as a musical “signature,” that it has been judged that it cannot have been accidental.
Six Fugues on B-A-C-H, Op. 60
Schumann described 1845 as his year of “Fugenpassion.” In November of 1845, a month before sketching the Second Symphony, he completed a series of six organ fugues based on the B-A-C-H motif. The Six Fugues on B-A-C-H, Op. 60 are the composer’s only works for organ.
The Six Fugues unfold as a vast symphony, moving through a dramatic and varied musical landscape. David Gammie observes that “the first two fugues together form a kind of symphonic first movement, consisting of Introduction and Allegro.” The third fugue uses “soft stops” and serves as a prelude for the fourth fugue which “makes extensive use of the Bachian devices of retrograde and stretto, and the intricate musical texture grows from a sober start to a grand conclusion.” (David Gammie) Following the scherzo-like fifth fugue, the set concludes with a grand double fugue.
This recording features János Pálúr, performing on the organ of Zirc Abbey in Hungary:
Six Pieces in Canon Form, Op. 56
The pedal piano, which first appeared in 1460, combines the piano with the foot pedals of the organ, which are capable of playing bass notes. Schumann encountered the unique instrument for the first time in Leipzig in 1843. He purchased a pedal piano in 1845, and composed this set of “songs without words.”
This performance by organist Dana Robinson was recorded at Smith Memorial Hall at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign:
Miss no opportunity to practice on the organ; there is no instrument that takes such immediate revenge on the impure and the careless, in composition as well as in the playing, as the organ.
-Robert Schumann
Recordings
- Schumann: Six Fugues on B-A-C-H, Op. 60, János Pálúr Amazon
Featured Image: the title page of Schumann’s Six Fugues on B-A-C-H, Op. 60