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

describes it well: ‘The concertante effects and interweaving of the violins with one
another, which occurred in the ritornellos, although it consisted for the most part of
passages which on paper may here and there have looked quite stiff and dry,
nevertheless had, in the open air and with such lavish resources, a very good effect,
indeed perhaps better than a more ‘galant’ [style of] melody ornamented with many
decorative figures and quick notes would have had in such circumstances...’ 3
Containing as it does a veiled critique of Fux’s conservatism, Quantz’s account readily
acknowledges the suitability of this style for such an occasion.
The music of Fux’s colleague Caldara had been equally dense and
contrapuntal. The versetti and toccatas of court organist Gottlieb Muffat were
essentially in the style of Frescobaldi, 4 his clavier suites in that of his teacher Fux;
although Muffat lived until 1770, he seems to have stopped composing nearly thirty
years earlier.
Any discussion of Haydn’s fugal writing has to begin by acknowledging that,
compared to the previous generation, fugue takes up a relatively small part of his
oeuvre. When Joseph Haydn came to Vienna Johann Joseph Fux, the last great
representative of the Austrian Baroque, was still Hofkapellmeister to the Imperial court
(he died the following year). By the time Haydn was expelled from St Stephen’s
Cathedral not quite ten years later most of Vienna’s official musical life was in the
hands of the next generation of musicians: Reutter, Wagenseil, and Monn. It was
these composers (many of them students of Fux) who made the decisive transition to
the galant style.
This fact is less paradoxical than it might appear. Fux was no hide-bound
pedant: ‘What fixed advice would I give about an arbitrary kind of music which is
subject to constantly changing taste? I by no means disapprove of the cult of novelty,
3 Ibid., p.340.
4 Some have in fact been taken for Frescobaldi’s own; cf S. Wollenberg, ‘A note on three fugues
attributed to Frescobaldi’, Musical Times 106/1584 (February 1975), 133-35.
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