Anton Reicha (1770 – 1836): 36 Fugues for Piano
For reasons best known to himself, Anton Reicha hated having his compositions either performed or published during his lifetime. The inevitable result was that most of his music would fall into complete obscurity after his death.
It has languished there ever since, quite undeservedly, as Reicha was possessed of an imagination even more forward-looking than Beethoven’s (even if he lacked some of Beethoven’s monumental technique). Both brilliant and occasionally bonkers, his music anticipates several modernistic trends of the early twentieth century – Neoclassicism, atonality, polyrhythms, the breakdown of metric regularity – all of which were still no more than distant star constellations in 1803.
Although born in Prague, Reicha would spend most of his life in two of Europe’s most important musical centres – Vienna and Paris. Vienna came first, where he made his name as an avant-garde experimenter, while in Paris (where he was eventually naturalized as a French citizen) he became celebrated as a progressive-minded teacher, theorist and composer of wind quintets.
Reicha had always shown an impulse to do things his way. Having lost his father in infancy, he decided to run away from his home at the age of ten – by literally jumping onto a passing stagecoach one day – before ending up in Wallerstein, Bavaria, where an uncle took pity on him and adopted him as his son. The uncle also happened to be a fine musician and taught him flute, violin and piano, while his wife completed his home-schooling with French and German lessons. Reicha went on to study at Bonn University, before fleeing again, this time from Napoleon rather than his mother, after the French had invaded the city in 1794. He relocated to Hamburg and gave lessons on composition and piano and studied mathematics and philosophy as well as further musical techniques. By the time he had moved to Vienna in 1801, he was ready to begin a composing surge of impressive dimensions. As he himself recalled, “the number of works I finished in Vienna is astonishing. Once started, my verve and imagination were indefatigable. Ideas came to me so rapidly it was often difficult to set them down without losing some of them. I always had a real penchant for doing the unusual in composition. When writing in an original vein, my creative faculties and spirit seemed keener than when following the precepts of my predecessors.”
Reicha might be summing up his whole approach to the writing of the 36 Fugues, our work in question. The very fact that a composer with avant-garde tendencies should be turning to a strict and old-fashioned seeming form of musical counterpoint is interesting in its own right. The fugue belonged to the halcyon days of the high Baroque, more than half a century earlier, when it had met its apotheosis at the genius hands of JS Bach. But it had fallen comparatively out of vogue by the start of the nineteenth century.
Basically, a fugue is the combination of several musical lines or “voices” (with each voice entering one by one at the start), which work both against each other and yet in intimation, while always coalescing into coherent harmonic rhythms. To be able to write a fugue successfully is seen as an impressive show of musical literacy – as countless poor music students, confronted by fugal homework assignments over the past two centuries, would attest.
The challenge for Reicha wasn’t only to pay homage to the great era of fugue (with its inevitable echoes of Bach) but to use the form to create new and daring experiments. Reicha would interpret all the various dos and don’ts around good fugue-writing as he saw fit, while adding a few new rules entirely of his own. The result is some remarkably inventive and original music, not least in the context of its time.
It should be pointed out that most of Reicha’s fugues would almost certainly fail a modern examination. He employs too much rule-breaking for good pedagogical taste, even in his more conservative attempts. Both his part-writing and free use of rhythm are decidedly unorthodox. But that is only the start. Whereas in the Bachian model the entry of each melodic line was supposed to take place in either the tonic or dominant key, thus keeping the tonality quite stable, Reicha often spreads the entries across entirely unrelated keys, resulting in some highly unusual modulations. The overall effect comes very close to bitonality (combining two musical lines in a different key at the same time).
As for the fugue subjects themselves, they can be almost anything with Reicha. In the Bachian model they usually have a fairly stable melodic shape, even when they are slightly chromatic – you could always easily harmonise them. But when Reicha goes chromatic, he goes all out to the point of near atonality (see especially fugues number 29 and 34). And never mind their tonality, sometimes the subjects have no melodic shape at all. In the remarkable fugue 18, the music opens with the same note repeated rapidly no less than 34 times, before it goes on to perform the role of an ostinato (recurring motif repeated obsessively), as well as pedal point (sustained bass note underpinning all the other harmonies).
It is not only the harmonies but rhythms which show genuine originality. Fugue 20 employs a five beats per bar time signature, again extremely uncommon for its time (Reicha would later write what most scholars consider the first orchestral piece in 5/8 – his Overture in D from 1823). In fugue 28, Reicha subdivides a time signature of 8/8 into three rhythmic blocks of 3+3+2, with a stress on the first note of each block, creating a little hiccupping upswing at the end of each bar. In some cases, there are no set time signatures, with fugue 30 continually shifting between different metric divisions and creating all manner of rhythmical mosaics.
Although references to Bach are inevitable in the fugues, further material is taken from composers ranging from Mozart and Haydn, to Scarlatti, Handel and Frescobaldi. Fugues number 5 and 9 are basically re-writes of fugues composed by Bach (his G Major from Book II of the 48 Preludes of Fugues) and Scarlatti (his famous “Cat” Fugue), using exactly the same subjects. It is interesting to put these side by side, contrasting the original, more traditional treatments with Reicha’s highly idiosyncratic versions. You could argue that Reicha is already creating a form of Neoclassicism, 120 years before Neoclassicism is a thing in music – although in his case he is drawing on almost contemporary models. I could go on further, but I suggest you try listening to some of the pieces to form your own impressions.
Although Reicha’s stay in Vienna was the most productive period for his composing life, he subsequently created a successful career for himself as a theorist and teacher after moving to Paris in 1806. He published several important treatises on writing music, wrote a series of high-quality (and highly influential) wind quintets, became a professor of counterpoint and fugue at the Paris Conservatoire and taught many of the stars of the next generation: Franz Liszt, Hector Berlioz and Charles Gonoud among them. Berlioz, who frequently fought with his other conservatoire tutors, had nothing but glowing praise for Reicha, later writing that his “lectures were wonderfully helpful, his demonstrations being absolutely clear because he invariably gave the reason for each rule. A thoroughly open-minded man, he believed in progress…”
Shortly before his death, Reicha was awarded the Legion d’Honneur by his adopted country.
Suggestions for Further Listening:
One of the primary inspirations for Reicha’s 36 Fugues would have been JS Bach’s two sets of Preludes and Fugues in all 24 possible major and minor keys (also known as Das Wohltemperierte Klavier).
Reicha’s later wind quintets are more stylistically conventional for their day, but show much of the same inventiveness, as well as a sharp ear for sonority and balance.