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

Superficially they have much in common. Both form the second part of a
‘French’ ouverture; in fact, like a number of Handel’s keyboard fugues, Stanley’s
fugue also exists as an orchestral movement (it had its origin as the overture to his
B.Mus. cantata The Power of Music—the arrangement may not even be by him,
although some of his later published organ movements also exist in orchestral form).
Both sacrifice elaborate contrapuntal working for the excitement of rapid figuration.
Both allow structural cadences to show through clearly in preference to obscuring
them as J. S. Bach did. There are, however, as many differences. Most obvious is the
greater length of Stanley’s subject: four bars of intense semiquaver figuration,
spanning a range of an octave and a half. By contrast, Handel’s subject (Ex.2.3) is
little more than a perfunctory contrapuntal tag, the sort of thing that started many a
seventeenth-century canzona (it is very similar in type, for example, to some of Johann
Pachelbel’s Magnificat fugues). This distinction between Handel and one of his most
gifted followers is seen here in an extreme form, but represents a genuine change that
was taking place in fugal style. Handel’s subjects tend to be fairly concise, and may or
may not form a complete phrase (that is to say, end with a cadence of some kind).
Those of most of his successors are generally somewhat longer, and almost always do.
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