A Fugue for Oboe and Piano

The finale of my Sonata for Oboe and Piano is a playful, energetic rondo in D minor, where the predominantly staccato articulation and embellishing grace notes lend a dance-like character to the A theme.

On closer examination, this melody is constructed in the same Baroque manner one often finds in Bach melodies: It is actually a compound melody, where the implied constituent elements are a sustained tonic, a sustained dominant, and a stepwise line (partly chromatic) bridging these two axes.

The quasi-Baroque quality becomes explicit in the final appearance of the A theme, where the grace notes are stripped off, the meter is changed to cut time, and the tempo is increased to produce a fugue subject.

This Baroque-style fugue starts around 2:55 in the video and provides a fitting dramatic conclusion to this large Romantic sonata.