Bach set to dance in a packed City Recital Hall.
Bach’s The Art of Fugue was a study piece, meant to be read not heard. Yet as with most of Bach’s compositions, it excites the mind of the student as much as the ear of the listener. Added to mind and sound is another dimension – movement – which is not often appreciated. Yet it is a dimension Bach was particularly fond of; we know he subscribed to dance classes in Leipzig. Austere as these essays in counterpoint may be, one element that is conspicuous throughout is rhythmic variety.
For this performance, the instrumentalists were relegated to the back on an elevated dais looking upon the stage laid out for acrobats from Queensland contemporary dance company, Circa. Sydney’s City Recital Hall was packed.
The first problem facing anyone who wishes to perform The Art of Fugue – composed as it is in four generic parts – is instrumentation. Harpsichord solo? Harpsichord and organ? Organ and strings? Voice? The Australian Brandenburg Orchestra was pared back to a string quartet, with Paul Dyer on harpsichord and organ.
The next problem is how to divide the fourteen contrapuncti and where to place the three canons. Dyer’s answer is to group the canon at the octave with the first four contrapuncti, to group the next three, the canon at the twelfth with the next 4, the inversion canon with the mirror fugues, and to leave the unfinished fugue on its own. The result is five sets. No interval.
The choreography accompanying Contrapunctus I could have made more imaginative use of the tense build-up and ultimate resolution in the closing cadence. The structure of that closing cadence is replicated in almost every contrapunctus so the problem was only multiplied.
The second contrapunctus was performed entirely on harpsichord by Dyer. In the third, Dyer doubles Marianna Yeomans on baroque viola. The choreography here was very thoughtful. The three principal voices become three female acrobats, simultaneously crawling on top of and peeling away from each other. It gives the impression of a unit from afar, but a unit that belies inner randomness. That is just as well. Much of The Art of Fugue recalls entropy in systems theory. We see order from afar. But Bach, with the wry smile we can see in his portrait, cheats by changing the theme to fit the rules of harmony, in a process his Renaissance forebears would have called inganno, or deception. At times, the three dancers join in rotating about an angular axis.
A composer who cannot write a canon is a quack. Bach was no quack. But he made everyone else look like one. In the first canon, the rumbunctious melody is repeated by the second voice, performed on violin by Shaun Lee-Chen, an octave lower. It is as though Dyer and Lee-Chen are playing tag, chasing one another in a circle. The dance capitalised on this with circular motion. The choreography also played nicely on the evident ascent and descent in the final canon, canon per augmentationem in contrario motu.
Dyer was right in separating the fifth from the preceding contrapuncti. It is the first stretto fugue. It stands proudly apart from the others. It has an almost ancient complexity and looks back with the confidence of age to the stile antico of the 16th century. When the theme appears inverted, one acrobat contorts their head 180 degrees, much to the audience’s surprise. The only reprieve from the constant interplay of rectus and inversus is an even tighter canonic bridge which comes suddenly like a flash of lightning. But at that point, the dance becomes stagnant. Equally, in the seventh and eighth we have falling chromaticisms in the music but nothing in the dance. One is left wondering why at some of the most poignant musical landmarks the choreography is left static.
Syncopation returns with the sixth. Dyer conducts at a sprightly pace. It is as though we are in the France of the Sun King. We have a French overture. Dancers are in line, moving to and fro largely in unison. The line they form is only dissolved once the tierce de picarde finally smiles upon the audience.
The choreography was most thoughtful in the third set. In the eighth, the dancers form a triangle and, with each theme, each peels away from it. In the busy ninth, each dancer rushes about the stage and, as with each voice, bumps violently into the other. Again, we have chaos at the micro level. The tenth is played at a sprightly pace. The choreography capitalised on the momentum with the theme of a line. The most thoughtful was the eleventh. The music is replete with inversions and chromaticisms rising step-wise. So amid everything we have an acrobat reversing step-wise and ever so slowly. And in the chromatic bridge giving our first taste of ‘B-A-C-H’, the dance quickens and the dancers are grouped in couples.
The unfinished fugue stands alone in Dyer’s fifth set. Dyer plays on continuo organ in unison with strings. That gives a delicious double-timbre, much like a claviorganum. It all ends with one acrobat pointing to us as the music abruptly ends and the lights vanish.
Perhaps it is for us to finish the fugue. Perhaps, like electrons which dance around unnoticed but disappear when watched, we were not just spectators but part of the conceit all along. Perhaps, to adapt from the closing lines of another great text, good compositions are finished by their first architects but great ones leave the copestone to posterity.
