| The study, an examination of the eight fugues in the string quartets of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, expanding the analytical techniques developed by Heinrich Schenker, demonstrates that tonal structure and thematic development in a fugue work together to create a unified whole. Subject entries generally mark significant points in the tonal structure, exhibiting an intimate relationship between thematic organization and tonal design.;Thematic development takes place at both foreground and middleground levels of the structure. Motives may be extracted from the subject or its counterpoints and used as material in episodic sections, but thematic development is not confined to breaking up the subject into motives. The fugue subject as an entity is itself developed during the course of the fugue. The subject, which has an implied structure at least in part ambiguous, appears first as a collection of potentials--a source of possible interpretations. The initial entry establishes the tonic, and has a certain linear relationship to tonic. With the entrance of the answer, an immediate reinterpretation of the theme is necessary, since the answer has a function entirely different from the subject in the tonal and linear structure of the exposition. Indeed, a new interpretation of the subject is needed each time it appears in a new harmonic or contrapuntal setting. Each subject entry reveals another aspect of the theme, and only at the end of the fugue, after the final statement of the subject, can the full meaning of the theme be understood, as the sum of all those various interpretations. That meaning, inherent in the initial subject entry, is only realized as the structure of the fugue unfolds.;Because of the inherent difficulties involved in the analysis of highly polyphonic music, almost none of the Schenkerian literature deals with fugue structure. The methodology developed in this study should provide a means for further exploration of this important genre. |
