Let the “layman” accustom himself not to be frightened by fugues. The fugue in the grand style of Bach, constructed with that unparalleled art which the first C major fugue in the “Wohltemperiertes Klavier” displays, or which is shown in the C sharp minor fugue, with its three themes gradually stratified one above the other, or rolling themselves off with that extraordinary ease which we daily admire in the famous A minor--this kind of fugue is a necessary speech of music: it is melody, it is a natural language which can never disappear. To grasp it, to assimilate it, until the many voices or even many themes of its development stand clearly before our eyes in their full characteristic value, is a feast for the musical epicure to which hardly anything else can be compared. Bach’s fugues are _playable_. They are not too easy; but they are so in the spirit of the clavier that the fingers soon lose their timidity, and the work is as a mirror in which they speedily recognise the necessary nature of their motion. And there is an eternally fresh animation in this activity, in which no deception, no dilettantism, no superfluity can exist for a moment. The great artist, to whom the “Fantasy” is a presupposition, does not work on it, however much it may seem to the crowd a chief aim; he works on the form which requires this kind of work. We see Bach, through his whole life, labouring at the fugue; and the encyclopædic work, in the midst of which he died, “The Art of Fugue,” shows us heights of power in this form which make us dizzy. Besides certain scattered fugues, he has made a collection of different periods in the two volumes of the “Wohltemperiertes Klavier.” Here every major and minor mode of every semitone is doubly treated, with a prelude and fugue--a comprehensiveness of arrangement which was partly due to the taste of the time,[77] and partly can be referred to the secondary aim of the work, which was the introduction of a system of clavier-tuning which should be sufficient for practical purposes, in which no acoustic solecisms should be committed to suit convenience, and in which all the keys should be used indifferently and in their completeness by pupils. It is not hard to detect that the unity of these two volumes is not very complete. Even Spitta, a meritorious but somewhat tasteless biographer, who seeks to find the “higher” unity in all Bach’s works, is compelled to grant that there are varieties of style and intrusions of alien matter in the “Wohltemperiertes Klavier.” But that is no loss. The brilliant many-sidedness of its contents can support even this discontinuity of style (which, by the way, is but a slight discontinuity) and this artistic fusion of certain preludes and fugues, which originally were not composed with a view to each other. No one will fail to perceive how wonderfully the preludes combine with each other and with many of the fugues. The