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

gets the impression that projecting the text itself was not one of Wesley’s especial
priorities. As a result, in performance the Confitebor comes across essentially as an
enormous symphony for voices and orchestra—a purely musical work, rather than the
fusion of music and text which is so much a part of the English choral tradition. It is a
impressive achievement and a fine piece of music, but its roots lay outside this
tradition and so it is no surprise perhaps that it never found a home there.
A fugue for string quartet, KO 526, that he wrote around this time 68 reflects his
engagement with the Covent Garden oratorios in a very different way. This
remarkable movement is based upon the two subjects of the fugue that concludes the
second part of Haydn’s Creation. 69 Haydn’s fugue is a fine piece of post-Handelian
rhetoric, fully exploiting the massiveness of the choral ensemble and the brilliance of
the orchestra to supply a resounding conclusion to the second part of the oratorio.
Preceded by eight bars of thematically unrelated homophonic introduction, it shows a
nice balance between contrapuntal interplay and homophonic peroration, with enough
learned device to generate interest and excitement (brief, mostly free stretti in bb.18-
20, 27-28, 30-33, 38-39, 51-52) but no more than is necessary.
Wesley’s movement—his ‘Grosse Fuge’, if you will—is nearly four times as
long as its model (264 bars compared to 68), and exploits the contrapuntal possibilities
of its subjects to a vastly greater extent. In no sense is this a re-writing of the Haydn;
from the very first it is a totally different fugue built upon the same subject. Even
Wesley’s version of the theme differs somewhat from Haydn’s (Ex.2.19). After
Haydn’s theme reaches the B flat in its second bar, it descends a fourth but returns to
cadence upon this note. Wesley, in contrast, extends this descent all the way to the
lower B flat, with the sequential countersubject following it down. It is, in fact,
remarkably similar in outline to the ‘Mandavit in aeternum’ fugue discussed above.
68 The autograph parts (BL Add 35007) are dated 31 August 1800.
69 No.27c, ‘Achieved in the glorious work’; the text to the fugue itself is ‘Glory to his name forever.
He sole on high exalted reigns. Hallelujah.’
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