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

when most of his contemporaries would have fallen back upon a much higher
proportion of literal repetition.
We spoke, in the introduction, of the structural contradictions between fugue
and sonata writing. There are, of course, many movements which attempt to combine
the two in different ways. In the critical literature this procedure is generally regarded
as a sort of profoundly unnatural tour de force, a collision between fundamentally
incompatible musical worlds. Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ symphony is ‘a musical miracle’;
something, in other words, which could not have been produced by natural means
alone; Beethoven’s ‘Hammerklavier’ sonata is ‘a titanic assertion of power. Unity is
attained, but after how terrible a struggle. ... He strains to make the ultimate assertion:
I will not be divided; I will be whole.’ 51
With Samuel Wesley there is none of this sense of oxymoron. He writes a
fugue that happens to be in ‘sonata-form’ (or, if you prefer, a sonata movement that
happens to have a fugal exposition for its first subject group) as if it were the most
natural thing in the world. It seems that the old-fashionedness of English musical taste
had its advantages: ‘In an era when Continental fugues are often either a purely
conventional device (Cherubini) or a struggle against superhuman odds (Beethoven), it
is quite refreshing to encounter numerous examples that are inventive without unduly
straining the musical language.’ 52
The past remained a living force in England, and Classical norms were only
adopted slowly. A composer might write a Handelian organ voluntary on Sunday, a
Classical sonata on Monday, a galant song for Vauxhall on Tuesday, a glee or a catch
on Wednesday, a mock-Renaissance madrigal on Thursday, and (if he was Samuel
Wesley) a stile antico motet for the Catholic liturgy on Friday. Unwinding after such a
51 A. Harman, A. Milner, and W. Mellers, Man and his music (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1962),
p.649.
52 J. Caldwell, The Oxford history of English music vol.II: c.1715 to the present day (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999), p.139.
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