Fantasia. 4 ||
Jhon Pieterson :| Sweeling |
Organista a Amstelreda.
Fitzwilliam Virginal Book
(Francis Tregian, 1610s?)
(Francis Tregian, 1610s?)
This Fantasia is not nearly as well known as Sweelinck’s Fantasia ‘cromatica’ [d1] and Fantasia Ut, re, mi... [F1], but it belongs alongside them as a masterpiece of its type: the fuga contraria or fugue renversée, of which there are a number of other examples (including one by Louis Couperin, unavailable when Dirksen catalogued the others in his book on Sweelinck’s keyboard works) using a similar subject. That subject is a double one in which the answer or (canonic) countertheme is the inversion of the initial subject, and whose second phrase in this case is also the inversion of part of the first. Dirksen has shown, however, that not only the obvious subjects, but in fact the vast majority of material in this piece, is derived from the music of the first few bars, lending it an unusual unity and complexity.
The piece (like practically all of Sweelinck’s monothematic fantasias) is cast in three broad sections, in this case of almost exactly equal length. The first sets forth the theme(s) in various pairings of voices, while the second and third deal respectively with the augmentation and diminution & stretto of the main subject. The countersubject of the bicinium that opens the second main section sounds like typically Sweelinckian free counterpoint – but when a third voice enters, that countersubject is heard again in inversion and invertible counterpoint (that is, both the subject and this countersubject are inverted as a unit, so that the countersubject is now above the subject, though in a sense still standing in the same relation to it). Although the third section deals mainly with shortening and overlapping of the subject material – a useful way to increase momentum as the piece nears its end – it begins with a one-
Not much is known regarding original performance practice for a piece like this. The appearance of this particular work in a large manuscript of music almost all intended for stringed keyboard instruments reminds us that it is entirely plausible to render this fantasia on the harpsichord (though I might not say the same for all of Sweelinck’s fantasias). It is often assumed that, on the organ, a fantasia should be played on a plenum registration, or alternatively on a reed or reed chorus, and not a few interpreters have developed sometimes elaborate schemes of manual and even registration changes. (It is possible, for example, to imagine a realization in which the right hand would move to a second manual for the bicinium, and perhaps the bass statements of the subject at bars 103 and 164 would be played on a reed in the pedal so that bb. 103–121 are played as a trio and the transition from, say, a reed to a diapason chorus at 164 would be less abrupt.) I am less and less convinced, however, that, under ideal circumstances, any such changes are necessary or warranted; in my own interpretative work, I find them ever so slightly artificial. The present recording was thus made throughout on one manual and one registration: a reed-