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

‘the footsteps of the giant’ behind him (as Brahms would later put it). In these works
he may have been the first to feel the ‘anxiety of influence’ which was to be such a
critical part of nineteenth- and twentieth-century attitudes to making music. 6
Beethoven—the main source of this anxiety for nineteenth-century musicians
(the ‘footsteps of the giant’ that Brahms heard were his)—had his own anxieties, not
least the overwhelming proximity of two unquestionable classics, Haydn and Mozart.
Indeed, his attitude toward Haydn (who was all the more threatening because he was
still alive, whereas Mozart could be safely idolised) would seem to have been
characterised by near-Oedipal resentment. Beethoven was also aware of the legacy of
Bach and Handel, but he had the strength of character—the chutzpah, if you prefer—to
seat himself in this company, not just as a follower or epigone, but as an original
genius in his own right. Even more remarkably, many of his contemporaries were
prepared to take him at his own valuation.
Chapter five, ‘Fugue in Beethoven: mundane and transcendental counterpoint’
begins by exploring the relationship between Beethoven and J. S. Bach. There are
curious parallels between them in their creative ambition and constant self-
improvement; both could describe themselves as one ‘who is never satisfied with
himself and who strives continually to make even greater progress in his art.’ 7 Both
seem also to have exhibited a sovereign indifference to contemporary musical fashion
—Beethoven’s music, indeed, seems explicitly to challenge the listener, and the
chapter continues with an exploration of the aesthetics of ‘difficult’ music. It ends
with a comparison between Beethoven and Clementi, whose later works show a
similar preoccupation with dissonant, recherché counterpoint, existing in a rarefied
6 See L. Whitesell, ‘Men with a past: music and the “anxiety of influence”’, 19 th -Century Music 18/2
(Autumn 1994), 152-67; M. E. Bonds, After Beethoven: imperatives of originality in the symphony
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); and of course H. Bloom’s The anxiety of
influence; a theory of poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).
7 In a letter from Beethoven to George Thomson in Edinburgh, 23 November 1809; The letters of
Beethoven, tr. and ed. Emily Anderson, 3 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1961), vol. I, p.248.
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