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

in the Overture to Alcina (1735). As with most of his opera overtures, we can see the
fugal writing ‘coalesce into the diddle-diddle of the cat and the fiddle as soon as the
third voice has entered with the theme’ (Tovey), 14 but it is none the worse for that.
At first the countersubject seems almost laughable: a row of notes merely
doubling the subject at a third’s distance (Ex.2.3); but note how the two distinctive
motives of the subject are already combined in the fourth bar, and how the second and
third entries overlap. It is not thematic or contrapuntal interest that holds our attention,
however, but the almost reckless harmonic inventiveness Handel shows. The stepwise
melodic descent of the subject receives a wide variety of harmonic interpretations (see
the harmonic reductions in Ex.2.4).
14 ‘Christopher Willibald Gluck’, in Essays and lectures on music (London: Oxford University Press,
1949), p.73. To be fair, Tovey goes on to say: ‘But the contrapuntist guides Handel’s harmonies and
basses as surely as a draughtsman may guide the scene-painter splashing his colours out of a pail.’
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