Dilettante Music

Shostakovich arranged his 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87 (1950 - 1951), into two books of 12 pairs each. The concluding and culminating piece of the first book is thus the G sharp minor Prelude and Fugue. While not quite the longest of the first book's works (the F sharp minor Prelude and Fugue is slightly longer), the G sharp minor is perhaps both the most emotionally intense and the most intellectually rigorous of all the prelude-and-fugue pairs of Book One.

The opening prelude is an enormous Andante passacaglia, a form the composer was particularly attracted to at this point in his career; one thinks, for example, of the passacaglias from his Eighth Symphony (1943) and his Violin Concerto No. 1 (1948). Like those and other passacaglias, the G sharp minor passacaglia is darkly colored and emotionally resolute to the point of fatalism. The subject remains in the left hand until its seventh statement, when it becomes a hymn-like melody in the right hand. When the subject returns to the left hand in the eighth statement, the right-hand's countersubject sinks down across the keyboard until by the ninth statement both hands are notated in the bass clef.

The four-voice fugue in 5/4 time that follows is in the same key as the passacaglia prelude, but its emotional content is entirely different. Indeed, it could almost be said not to have an emotional content. The three-bar subject is in three short phrases, two clearly in G sharp minor but the third moving out of G sharp minor into A major and then back, just as quickly, to G sharp minor. This brief harmonic movement seems to dispel the clouds of the remorseless G sharp minor of the passacaglia, and, taken together with the rapid and vigorous development of the subject, seems to help the fugue rise above and beyond the emotional gloom of the passacaglia to inhabit a world of pure contrapuntal thought. In the last bars, when the texture thins, when the tempo slows to Andante and then ritardando al Fine, when the dynamic level drops diminuendo poco a poco to pianississimo, and when the minor third of G sharp minor turns to the major third of G sharp major held under a fermata, it is as if the darkness of G sharp minor has been clarified and even purified. ~ All Music Guide