About
Written between 2018 and 2021, the 24 Preludes and Fugues were not initially conceived as a cohesive set, nor even as a complete journey through all the major and minor keys. Some of the Fugues had already been written separately before 2018, but they were waiting for an opportunity to put them together in some way, and I even initially thought of a small notebook with just a few isolated fugues, without the preludes, and without a tonal logic. When, however, I gathered and reviewed them with a view to this edition, adding the respective Preludes, I quickly realized that they were all written in different keys. So, having already completed 5 or 6 Fugues and knowing that until today no one in Portugal and, I believe, in the Iberian Peninsula, had written a complete cycle of 24 Preludes and Fugues in all the major and minor keys, I decided to compose the remaining pieces. The Fugues are quite free from a formal point of view and are very close to the old forms that precede the modern fugue, namely the Tento, the Ricercare, or the polyphonic Fantasy. Each Fugue, as well as each Prelude, is very different from each other, and the emotional atmosphere of the pieces ranges from Arcadian serenity to tragic drama. In fact, the cycle begins exhilaratingly and ends on a note of apprehension with the end of Fugue 24 which, although written on a challenging and decided theme, which closes the cycle in a brutal and definitive way, still fails to “clean up” the dark suggestions that it creates throughout its polyphonic journey, shadows that end up dominating the various bright “fanfares” in “stretto” that characterize the central section of Fugue 24.
Sérgio Azevedo