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I'm in the early stages of reading The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse and the protagonist, Joseph Knecht, is visited by a musical maestro. The two play a song together and then the master asks the pupil a curious question:

"Do you happen to know what a fugue is?" the Master now asked.

Knecht looked dubious. He had already heard fugues, but had not yet studied them in class.

"Very well," the Master said, "then I'll show you. You'll grasp it quicker if we make a fugue ourselves. Now then, the first thing we need for a fugue is a theme, and we don't have to look far for the theme. We'll take it from our song."

This struck me as being oddly specific: I wasn't sure exactly what a fugue was and had to look it up, and I'd wager that most readers who weren't fairly familiar with classical music wouldn't either. It seemed a particularly explicit way to talk about something when a number of more generic musical terms would have sufficed, so I presumed it was meaningful in some way.

Looking it up, I was surprised to discover that fugues are a recurring motif in the rest of the novel.

What do fugues represent, and why did Hesse choose this musical term specifically?

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My personal interpretation of why Hesse might have picked that example.

A fugue is not just any random piece of music, it follows a number of formal rules and constructions. In some sense, composing a fugue has aspects of solving a puzzle. One could say that a fugue relates to a song the way a sonnet relates to a poem. It is a specific type with a lot of extra rules. This makes the whole piece fit together in particular ways. If you know about the rules you can try to decode them while listening to the fugue and discover extra layers of meaning.

I would see a fugue as a metaphor or a simplified example of what the actual glass bead game in the book is.

Sidenote, I would think that most people in Hesses time in German speaking countries that would potentially read his book would know what a fugue is. So in the historic context of the book, this concept would be a lot more well-known that it is today.

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  • "people in Hesses time in Germany". The novel was published in 1943, not in Germany, because the Nazis didn't want it, but in Switzerland. Hesse had acquired Swiss citizenship in 1923.
    – Tsundoku
    Commented Nov 11 at 11:19
  • @Tsundoku Good point, I changed it to German speaking.
    – quarague
    Commented Nov 11 at 11:50
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    A fugue has two or three separate musical melodies or themes that are interwoven or have intertwining parts (voices). So, the book must have that as well in some way. It's a stand-in for plot complexity or interconnectedness...
    – Lambie
    Commented Nov 11 at 18:31

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