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

The documents of musical reception are plentiful and often overwhelmingly
explicit (if at times wildly contradictory); documents of musical genesis are
comparatively rare and frequently cryptic and mysterious. The individualism and self-
consciousness that enable so many of today’s composers to speak at length with
eloquence about their own sources, procedures, and inspiration, were not a large part
of eighteenth-century culture. Bach left little beyond a few entries in parish minute-
books and what can be inferred from the title pages of his works. In the case of Haydn
we will be assembling a picture from such sketchy materials as the comments of a
small group of theorists, a passing remark from the only autobiographical sketch he
wrote himself, the two contradictory accounts he gave of his encounter with C. P. E.
Bach, and a conversion recollected after his death. Even the letters of Mozart—surely
one of the most comprehensive and detailed personal documentations of the age—
were written to satisfy the enquiries of his father, not to answer the questions that we
might want to ask. The origin and abandonment alike of his ‘Great’ C minor Mass K.
427, for example, remain deeply enigmatic; and the cryptic references in his letters
only compound the confusion (see pp.290-93 below).
In many cases the best—almost the only—evidence of what a piece is ‘for’
turns out to be the piece itself. Musical structures are human artefacts after all, not
inanimate networks of crystals. They come into existence to undertake one or more of
a number of different kinds of cultural work, and as with any other artefacts the
circumstances of their origin leave marks upon their physical ‘surface’. As a result,
exploration into what these fugues meant to their authors—how did they come to be?
—both arises out of and leads back to enquiry as to what they are.
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