Art of Fugue - Infinite Riches in a Little Room

The following is an extract from Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting where he gives a commentary on the aesthetics of variations, a form that concerns Bach’s Art of Fugue and the Chaconne:

A symphony is a musical epic. We might say that it is like a voyage leading from one thing to another, farther and farther away through the infinitude of the exterior world. Variations are also like a voyage. But that voyage does not lead through the infinitude of the exterior world. In one of his pensées, Pascal says that man lives between the abyss of the infinitely large and the abyss of the infinitely small. The voyage of variations leads into that other infinitude, into the infinite diversity of the interior world lying hidden in all things.

Beethoven thus discovered in variations another area to be explored. His variations are a new ‘invitation to the voyage.’

Variation form is the form in which concentration is brought to its maximum: it enables the composer to speak only of essentials, to go straight to the core of the matter. A theme for variations often consists of no more than sixteen measures. Beethoven goes inside those sixteen measures as if down a shaft leading into the interior of the earth.

The voyage into that other infinitude is no less adventurous than the voyage of the epic. It is how the physicist penetrates into the wondrous depths of the atom. With every variation Beethoven moves farther and farther away from the initial theme, which resembles the last variation as little as a flower its image under a microscope.

Man knows he cannot embrace the universe with its suns and stars. Much more unbearable is for him to be condemned to lack the other infinitude, that infinitude near at hand, within reach. Tamina lacked the infinitude of her love, I lacked Papa, and all of us are lacking in our work because in pursuit of perfection we go toward the core of the matter but never quite get to it.

That the infinitude of the exterior world escapes us we accept as natural. But we reproach ourselves until the end of our lives for lacking that other infinitude. We ponder the infinitude of the stars but are unconcerned about the infinitude our papa has within him. It is not surprising that in his later years variations became the favourite form for Beethoven, who knew too well (as Tamina and I know) that there is nothing more unbearable than lacking the being we loved, those sixteen measures and the interior world of their infinitude of possibilities.

Though somewhat elliptical with the wide-ranging metaphors, Kundera identified the essence of variations—a desire to know everything there is to know about something simple and close by, be it a fugue subject as in the Art of Fugue, a harmonic progression as in the Chaconne, or, in Kundera’s case, his own father. More often than not, such desires lead one to bottomless pits and not infinite riches. Fixation with the opening four bars of the Chaconne gives you an unending sense of the pathétique that the middle section, however pious and assuring, cannot rein in.

The Art of Fugue on the other hand, resembles more the pursuit within the ‘wondrous depths of the atom’ in that there ought to be a definite end to the journey—we may find smaller and smaller components the further we look inside the atom (first protons and neutrons and then quarks) but sooner or later we will come to a component that is the building block of everything. In this case, it is not the journey that matters, but the riches we draw from the discoveries. There are only so many contrapuntal permutations one can fit onto the Art of Fugue subject and it is safe to say that Bach had them all figured out. Having reached the end of that intellectual journey, the Art of Fugue then becomes a meditation on the nature of contrapuntal techniques: contrapunctus 1-4 uses free counterpoint and brings out the inherent melancholia of the subject; contrapunctus 5-7 are stretto fugues, a process that wears the brain out; this sets up the delusional invertible counterpoints in contrapunctus 8-11, especially in no. 10 which gives the impression of being in both major and minor. Bach did not end the Art of Fugue on contrapunctus 11 but continues to explore the mind-splitting mirror fugues—fugues that can be played upside-down—though realistically, one would need to have the temperaments of a Buddhist monk to be able to carry on without going delirious.

August 2015

變奏曲﹒萬花筒

變奏曲就有如萬花筒，裏面收藏了各種各樣的圖案及變化，望入去就有如進入了一個新的世界。巴哈的《賦格曲之技》及夏康舞曲均是變奏曲的一種，但是，萬花筒說到底只是個非常有趣的玩意，變奏曲卻有一個實在的藝術價值，因為它的主體並非隨機的幾何圖案而是一條條帶有情感的旋律。

著名捷克作家米蘭﹒昆德拉（1929年生）曾在他的小說中作這樣一個比喻：交響曲有如一個偉大的探險歷程，旨在發掘新世界、新宇宙，而變奏曲雖然看上去沒交響曲這麼偉大，但它同樣是個旅程，旨在探索粒子層面的世界，思考每件事物內在的奧妙。人類對外太空的研究有如夸父追日，是不可能得到完滿的結果，於是貝多芬年老時逐漸對交響曲及奏嗚曲失去興趣，轉而在變奏曲上下功夫，放棄於外在的發展而追求內在的認知。

雖然昆德拉所描寫的是貝多芬的音樂，但他從中帶出變奏曲的精粹，卻是適用於其他作曲家的。巴哈的《賦格曲之技》是他最後一部作品，雖然裏面十三首賦格曲全部由同一個主題衍生出來，但這作品所變奏之意實不在那平平無奇的旋律，卻在於賦格曲本身的概念。賦格曲的寫作技巧大致分為自由對位、緊湊對全及轉換對位，就寫作方面一般會以轉換對位為入門。但進階的轉換對位乃是諸多手法中含最大空間表達情感的一種，而緊湊對位就是最費神的一種，於是巴哈從樂曲的結構下手，在轉換對位賦格曲前放入一連三首緊湊法賦格曲，宛如為後面更抒情的音樂作齋戒，然後到第八首賦格曲就讓感情像块堤般一湧而發。此外，十度及十二度的轉換對位容易混淆樂曲的調性，猶其在心神疲倦的時候令人產生幻覺以為音樂終於從小調轉到大調。

2015年8月