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

the subject (where again he seems not to have been aware of the implied suspensions
on each downbeat), but in the episodes, where he shows a new facility for spinning out
contrapuntal lines, and growing skill in preparing and resolving suspensions.
Later in the same manuscript appears a fugue that demonstrates the next stage
in his self-education, and marks a serious attempt to manage three consistently
independent strands—he actually writes them out upon three staves. It is a very
cautious piece: the subject is merely an ascent from 1 to 5 followed by a stepwise
descent; the countersubject (it is a double fugue) is hardly more complex. Throughout
the piece he is content to present these two bits of material in a variety of simple
permutations, in closely related keys (I, V, vi, and iii), while concentrating on keeping
his voice-leading correct. Despite occasional strange discontinuities within each voice
—bb.14, 20, 23-24, 43-44 (most of which would be less noticeable if the fugue were
written out on two staves), and imperfect control over their tessitura and overall
melodic direction—he largely succeeds.
By this stage of his education, then, he has acquired a basic fugal vocabulary.
He has practised handling such basic material as common cadential patterns,
preparation and resolution of suspensions, the descending chromatic tetrachord,
ascending scalar progressions, invertible counterpoint at the octave, dominant pedal
points—and was now well on the way towards acquiring a usable contrapuntal
technique. These first painful steps make an interesting comparison with the
contrapuntal studies that Felix Mendelssohn undertook at a similar age. 37 The greater
fluency even of Mendelssohn’s first fugal attempts is probably not so much a
consequence of greater natural gifts as of having a thorough background in figured
bass and chorale harmonisation, a sound, authoritative textbook to refer to
(Kirnberger’s Die Kunst des reinen Satzes in der Musik), and an attentive, if strict,
37 Documented in R. Larry Todd, Mendelssohn’s musical education: a study and edition of his
exercises in composition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
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