a musical composition in which one or two themes are repeated or imitated by successively entering voices, instruments, or parts and are developed by a continuous interweaving
The origins of fugue are found in choral motets by 15th-cent. Flemish composers; slowly the typical features of fugue evolved and three hundred years later J S Bach, in his last work, The Art of Fugue, took this most sophisticated form of imitative counterpoint to its limits. Composers have continued to find its challenge irresistible; Verdi failed his entrance test to music school with an early fugue, but the ten-part finale of his last opera Falstaff is one of the most remarkable examples of the genre — Amanda Holden
in psychiatry, a disturbed state characterized by loss of memory and by the patient's disappearance from home
[prob from Italian fuga flight, fugue, from Latin fuga flight, from fugere to flee]