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

hectic week, he could choose between going to hear Joseph Haydn and his latest
symphony, or the Academy of Ancient Music playing Corelli and Geminiani.
It is probably true to say that Samuel never felt perfectly at ease with the
mature Classical sonata. He published more than twenty before the turn of the century,
but only those of op.3 (1789?) approach the sophistication of Haydn’s maturity. 53
Among the eight movements of this set can be found only one in ‘sonata form’, the
first movement of the first sonata. Here, with all the attractive material at his disposal,
he makes some strange miscalculations, such as the drastic slowing in harmonic
rhythm at b.17, the static and unimaginative Alberti bass in b.17-31, or the way in
which the final cadence in octaves that concludes the exposition and recapitulation
somehow fails to release the tension of the four-bar iib preparation (although the way
in which this passage is extended into a brief coda at the very end is effective and
unexpected). These structural miscalculations would have been avoided by a more
experienced composer like J. C. Bach, or even Pleyel or Vanhal; with better control
over long term rhythmic shape, they could present much less appealing material with
greater effect. While the first movements of the other two sonatas have something of
the weight and scope of normal ‘sonata-form’ first movements, they are in fact highly
original and unusual rondo-like pieces and thus avoid the difficulties of charting long-
term tonal goals. As we shall see, the two ‘sonatas’ he published in the nineteenth
century also had even less to do with Classical norms (see pp.186-93 below).
Thus it was that Samuel Wesley, by far the most original English composer of
his time, found his métier in apparently conservative genres that had strong roots in the
past: the organ voluntary, the Roman Catholic motet and mass, and the oratorio.
53 Op.3 is reprinted in Samuel Wesley and contemporaries, vol. VII of Nicholas Temperley’s series
The London pianoforte school (New York: Garland, 1985).
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