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Marianna von Martines's Dixit Dominus

rotation charts a journey from tonic to dominant, and in her composition.
the second rotation returns home. The form of move- Martines’s fugues are, however, unusual in a number
ment 2 can be mapped as follows (Table 6 on page 13). of respects. To begin with, both fugues in the Dixit es-
Movement 3 follows a similar plan but with an exten- sentially use real answers; only at the very end of each
sion. At the end of the second rotation, Martines inserts answer does Martines alter the strict transposition in or-
a restatement of the movement’s entire text, which did der to arrive back at the tonic for the third entrance.
not occur in rotation I (Table 7 on page 13). Martines Movement 7, for instance, opens with these two subject
was evidently well versed in constructing binary forms, statements shown in Figure 3 on page 13.
and was able to alter and extend the basic formal tem- The fugues’ harmonic and motivic structure is equally
plate to meet her musical needs. unconventional. Harmonically, they hardly venture out-
Martines structures two other movements as fugues, side the tonic and dominant keys. Only at the cadential
a quintessentially Baroque form found frequently ends of episodes are non-tonic keys occasionally toni-
throughout Handel’s Dixit Dominus (movement 5, the end cized—for example, a half cadence in v in movement 4
of movement 9, and parts of movement 7). Martines’s (m. 22), and a rather abrupt half cadence in vi in move-
movement 4, which has a slow introduction before its ment 7 (m. 26). Motivically, they eschew every subject
fugue, and movement 7, are both built according to this transformation commonly used in fugues: their subjects
principle. Martines’s choice of this form shows not only are never transposed (beyond the real answers fi rst heard
a thorough knowledge of Baroque compositional pro- in the exposition), inverted, retrograded, augmented, or
cesses but a desire to display this expertise prominently diminished.

12 CHORAL JOURNAL April 2021 Volume 61 Number 9