Dilettante Music

Shostakovich joined together many kinds of preludes with his fugues: chants and fugues, pastorals and fugues, inventions and fugues, passacaglias and fugues. But his pairing of a waltz and a fugue in the D flat major Prelude and Fugue of the Op. 87 set is the most unlikely. The waltz is a brightly colored and slightly sarcastic piece which, for all its modulations and chromatic inflections, is thoroughly grounded in its key. The fugue that follows is anything but grounded; indeed, demented might be a better description. With a six-bar subject that covers 11 of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale, that changes time signature three times, and that is marked marcatissimo sempre, the subject is a reckless, almost madcap, choice for a fugue. But Shostakovich pulls it off by pushing the eleven-note subject through six wild pages of tonal and temporal instability.

An exhilarating and almost incomprehensible fugue preceded by an ironic and easily understood prelude: at this point Shostakovich seemed capable of yoking together any combination of movements to form a cohesive pair. ~ All Music Guide