And those who love to find precise mathematical structural divisions and markers in Bach's music will enjoy that it is in the 33rd measure - one measure shy of the exact midpoint of BWV 578 - that Bach introduces the subject in a key outside the tonic-dominant loop of the exposition. During the episodes, Bach employs one of Corelli's most beloved sequential gestures: imitation between two voices on an eighth-note upbeat figure that first leaps up a fourth and then falls back one step at time. It is worked out in four voices, the pedal voice being honored as the full equal of the three manual voices - even to the extent that the feet are required, in one electrifying passage late in the fugue, to have a go at a sixteenth-note figuration of the countersubject. The "Little" G minor's four-and-a-half measure subject is one of Bach's most widely recognized tunes. Bach probably composed the "Little" G minor fugue sometime between 17, when he was a young up-and-coming organist in the city of Arnstadt. Bach's Fugue in G Minor for organ (BWV 578) is known as the "Little" G minor not because it is a work of small importance or even because it is an unusually short work in its own right, but simply so that it and the much longer and later "Great" G minor Fantasia and Fugue (BWV 542) might not be mistaken for one another. Difficulty: IV (see Ratings for explanation)
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