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Updated: June 26, 2025
Bach and Chopin had anticipated him in some of his most startling chord progressions. The motives of Bach's fugues and Beethoven's sonatas and symphonies, and the so-called "leading motives" of the Frenchman, Hector Berlioz, had preceded his "typical motives." Moreover, the orchestration of Berlioz had been a precursor of his orchestral tone-coloring.
"Soon I saw the wonderful design of the great master of Eisenach. The architecture of the fugues became plainer and plainer. Each subject became a friend and each answer likewise. It was a great joy to observe with what marvelous craftsmanship he had built up the wonderful structures. I could not stop when I had memorized the first fugue, so I went to the next and the next and the next.
Epitaphs always fascinated him, and formerly he used to say he should like to be buried at Langar and to have on his tombstone the subject of the last of Handel's Six Great Fugues.
In classical music there are, as the analytical programs tell us, first subjects and second subjects, free fantasias, recapitulations, and codas; there are fugues, with counter-subjects, strettos, and pedal points; there are passacaglias on ground basses, canons ad hypodiapente, and other ingenuities, which have, after all, stood or fallen by their prettiness as much as the simplest folk-tune.
Peter that Mathias Van den Gheyn delighted to execute those wonderful "morceaux fugues" now at once the delight and the despair of the musical world, upon the fine chime of bells in the tower. This venerable tower was entirely destroyed in the terrible bombardment of the town in 1914.
Modern organs do not thus sound. Is the secret of the organ tone lost like the varnishing of Cremona fiddles and the blue of the old Delft china? There are no fancy "barnyard stops," as John Runciman has named the combinations often to be found in latter-day instruments. You understood after hearing the Haarlem organ why Bach wrote his organ preludes and fugues.
Puvis is by no means a virtuoso. His pace is usually andante; but he knows how to evoke a mood, summon the solemn music of mural spaces. His is a theme with variations. The wall or ceiling is ever the theme. His crabbed fugues soon melt into the larger austere music of the wall. His choral walls are true epopées. He is a master harmonist. He sounds oftener the symphonic than the lyric note.
Vogler, who lately conducted the mass, is barren and frivolous a man who imagines he can do a great deal, and does very little. The whole orchestra dislike him. To-day, Sunday, I heard a mass of Holzbauer's, which is now twenty-six years old, but excellent. He writes very well, and has a good church style, arranges the vocal parts as well as the instrumental, and writes good fugues.
Yet, is it not something a vain virtue, perhaps to possess the courage of one's windmills! From the Paris of the days when I haunted the ateliers of Gérôme, Bonnat, Meissonier, Couture, and spent my enthusiasms over the colour-schemes of Decamps and Fortuny, to the Paris of the revolutionists, Manet, Degas, Monet, now seems a life long. But time fugues precipitately through the land of art.
The digging of the soil preparatory to raising a corn-crop is work; the making of brooms; the writing of fugues. There is no one who does not work, at one time or another, and a man's social value depends largely upon the amount of work that he can do. Even the energy which is seemingly applied to destructive tasks is really subsidiary to a constructive ideal.
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