J. S. BACH Jonathan Berkahn - Victoria University - Victoria ...

important events throughout the rest of the movement. The tonic, for example returns
immediately with the answer to the new subject, but there are two further detours in
the direction of the relative minor, one of which moves as far flat-ward as the
dominant minor. A final return to F major occurs only fifteen bars from the end, and is
not uncontested until halfway through the very final entry. Bach handles the entry of
the pedal in a similarly oblique manner. He first of all delays its reappearance for over
sixty bars, giving a provisional and temporary air to his development of the new
material. The pedal enters relatively discreetly in b.134 with the second subject; it is
allowed to present the main subject in b.147, but this entry is on vi—only in b.163
does the pedal finally get the subject in the tonic. In same way, the return of the first
subject and its combination with the second manages to avoid schematism. Krebs had
a new exposition for his second subject, developing it at some length, before pairing it
with the first and developing them together in another separate section. Bach, by
contrast, reintroduces the first subject almost inaudibly in the middle of the texture at
b.95, so this crucial structural moment is likely to pass unnoticed by all except the
most attentive listeners. The thematic combination first appears with the answer to
this entry, and from then on they mostly (not quite always) appear together; but the
second subject is often truncated to give greater flexibility to the texture.
Like Palestrina (from whom, via the stile antico, this music can legitimately
claim descent), Bach could here be said to display a high degree of what Keats called
‘negative capability’ 99 —the ability to sustain textural flux and instability over, in this
case, quite transcendental stretches, continually resisting the temptation to settle into
any sort of rhythmic or melodic symmetry.
The purpose of this analysis has been to attempt to demonstrate that the
difference between Bach and even his most gifted imitators is not simply a question of
99 ‘I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries,
doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’ (letter to his brother, 21 Dec 1817).
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