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

A little more Bach can be seen, perhaps, in some of Wesley’s later organ
music. The sensitive two- and three-part writing of some of his ‘Twelve [recte
thirteen] short pieces for the organ with a full voluntary added’ (1816) may have
Bachian roots; and there is an even clearer reference to the WTC fugue cited above in
the ‘full voluntary’ which closes the set. The most striking evidence of Bach’s
influence, however, occurs at the end of a voluntary in C minor from 1826 dedicated to
Thomas Adams (KO 606). The fugue in question is densely contrapuntal, its first
hundred or so bars replete with inversion and stretto (all carefully annotated with the
same symbols Wesley used in his edition of the WTC); but the resemblance becomes
unmistakable in b.114 when, for the first time, the pedals enter with the subject in
augmentation (Ex.2.29). There follows an extended dominant pedal underneath a
doubly augmented treble entry, after which the fugue concludes. Olleson cites Bach’s
pedaliter Fugue in C BWV 547 in this connection, which likewise withholds the pedal
until an entry in augmentation near the end; 75 a more accessible model might have
been the C minor fugue from WTC II.
KO 606 is exceptional, however, in its indebtedness. The voluntary in B flat
KO 622 he wrote three years later for Thomas Attwood returns to—and is perhaps the
crowning example of—his free-wheeling, improvisatory fugal style, its wide ranging
and energetic subject strongly reminiscent of that in Handel’s Concerto Grosso in F
op.6/2 (Ex.2.30).
75 Wesley, p.308.
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