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

admirable Musick might be played into Fashion: you see I have only risked one
modest Experiment, & it has electrified the Town just in the way we wanted.’ 112 His
attitude has been amply vindicated by history (if this means anything more than that it
happens to correspond with our own), but it is unlikely that he profited much himself.
THE ‘SALOMON’ SONATA
The domains of ‘artistic’ and ‘commercial’ music were in the process of
polarising throughout Samuel Wesley’s career. This was perhaps an inevitable
consequence of the growing awareness of music’s commercial possibilities (equally a
consequence, maybe, of the growing autonomy of instrumental music), but it is
remarkable how well and for how long the composers of the late eighteenth century
held the two domains in suspension; this may be one reason we call their style
‘Classical’. 113 The sonatas of Haydn (for example) were outstandingly popular, as the
number of piracies testifies, yet there is little evidence of pandering to the ‘lowest
common denominator’. Those sonatas Wesley published in the eighteenth century
(opp.1, 3, 4, and 5) show much the same balance, attractive without being overtly
commercial (one might equally say artistic without being obscure). By contrast, the
two he published in the nineteenth century show the breakdown of this Classical
equilibrium, one falling neatly on each side of this cultural divide. His Siege of
Badajoz sonata KO 706 (c.1812, no opus number) was a typical battle piece, no better
or worse that the dozens of others that had begun to flood the market, as up-to-date as
a current affairs programme and as quickly dated. On the other hand, the Sonata for
the Piano Forte, in which is introduced a Fugue from a Subject of Mr Salomon KO
705 (1808; also without opus number) was perhaps the most serious, ambitious,
112 Letter to Burney, 23 June 1808, ibid., p.65.
113 This is, I think, as true of Pleyel and Dittersdorf and Vanhal as it is of Haydn and Mozart, being a
consequence of common stylistic practices rather than individual genius.
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