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

deliberately challenging piece for the piano that he ever wrote.
This extraordinary piece was dedicated to Johann Peter Salomon (Haydn’s
impresario), a long-standing friend and fellow Bach-enthusiast. It was probably
written in early 1808, and with it Wesley’s fugal style decisively enters the nineteenth
century. 114 If correct, the date is significant. 1808 marked the height of his enthusiasm
for J. S. Bach; which makes it all the more striking that Olleson should find that ‘the
writing is not even remotely tinged by Bach, and the fugue is in the austere, gritty
manner that characterizes so many fugues by composers of the late Classical period.’ 115
It is possible that the two halves of this sentence are not quite as contradictory as
Olleson thinks. As we shall see, one of the effects that Bach had upon composers who
were demonstrably writing under his influence—Mozart, Clementi, and Beethoven—
was indeed just such an ‘austere, gritty manner’ as Olleson describes. If the fluidity of
Bach’s style had been was lost beyond recall, composers could still emulate his
rigorous contrapuntal logic, his tolerance for incidental dissonance, and his thematic
economy; with results much like those seen here.
The sonata begins with a grandiloquent Lento introduction. At once it recalls
both the post-Handelian French ouverture style still current in contemporary organ
voluntaries (as in his own op.6/4, 9, 11, and 12) and the slow introductions of some of
Haydn’s late symphonies. It is closest of all, however, to certain sonatas of the
London pianoforte school which recreate the symphonic slow introduction in keyboard
terms; notably Clementi’s opp.34/2, 40/3, and 50/3. The sophisticated dynamics,
biting dissonance, and rich texture show that Wesley is engaging with the keyboard
language of his pianist contemporaries—Clementi, Dussek, Field and Cramer—and
pointing the way forward to the next generation of Romantics (compare the slow
introduction to Mendelssohn’s Caprice op.33/3 of 1835).
114 It was reviewed in May of that year by the Monthly Magazine, having presumably been published
shortly before this time.
115 Olleson, Wesley, p.317.
187