ess complicated
stretto-fugues and the fugues in double and triple counterpoint are
perfect works of art and as beautiful as any that Bach wrote without
didactic purpose.

Fugue is still, as in the 16th century, a texture rather than a form;
and the rules given in most technical treatises for its general shape
are based, not on the practice of the great composers, but on the
necessities of beginners, whom it would be as absurd to ask to write a
fugue without giving them a form as to ask a schoolboy to write so many
pages of Latin verses without a subject. But this standard form,
whatever its merits may be in combining progressive technique with
musical sense, has no connexion with the true classical types of fugue,
though it played an interesting part in the renaissance of polyphony
during the growth of the sonata style, and even gave rise to valuable
works of art (_e.g._ the fugues in Haydn's quartets, _op._ 20). One of
its rules was that every fugue should have a stretto. This rule, like
most of the others, is absolutely without classical warrant; for in Bach
the ideas of stretto and of counter-subject almost exclude one another
except in the very largest fugues, such as the 22nd in the second book
of the Forty-eight; while Handel's fugue-writing is a masterly method,
adopted as occasion requires, and with a lordly disdain for recognized
devices. But the pedagogic rule proved to be not without artistic point
in more modern music; for fugue became, since the rise of the
sonata-form, for some generations a contrast with the normal means of
expression instead of being itself normal. And while this was so, there
was considerable point in using every possible means to enhance the
rhetorical force of its peculiar devices, as is shown by the astonishing
modern fugues in Beethoven's last works. Nowadays, however, polyphony is
universally recognized as a permanent type of musical texture, and there
is no longer any reason why if it crystallizes into the fugue-form at
all it should not adopt the classical rather than the pedagogic type.

It is still an unsatisfied wish of accurate musicians that the term
fugue should be used to imply rather a certain type of polyphonic
texture than the whole form of a composition. At present one runs the
risk of grotesque misconceptions when one quite rightly describes as
"written in fugue" such passages as the first subjects in Mozart's
_Zauberfloete_ overture, the andantes of Beethoven's fir