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

of the historical context—is especially mysterious in itself. If our awareness of
instrumental fugal writing is confined to the works of Bach and Handel, then, yes, the
presence of three strict fugues in Haydn’s op.20 does seems a little curious. We have
already seen, however, that these movements are not entirely isolated, even within
Haydn’s own oeuvre. So when we realise that there was a flourishing Viennese school
of composers writing chamber fugues throughout much of Haydn’s life: Tuma,
Wagenseil, Birck, Monn, Gassmann, Ordoñez, Kohaut, Sonnleithner, Albrechtsberger,
and many others—indeed, that Vienna was probably the most prolific centre of fugal
writing during the later eighteenth century—the mystery seems a lot less impenetrable.
There is an analogy here with the impression that Haydn’s ‘Sturm und Drang’
symphonies made upon Théodore de Wyzewa early last century. Familiar chiefly with
the cheerfulness and optimism of the ‘London’ symphonies, he was stunned to come
across the challenging, dangerous music Haydn had written around 1772, and posited a
‘crise romantique’ in Haydn’s life at this time. Time passed, research progressed, and
the outline of Wyzewa’s musical crisis began to seem less clear. No biographical trace
was ever unearthed of Haydn’s hypothetical ‘crise romantique’ or of the unknown
‘immortal beloved’ that Wyzewa had inferred. The ‘Sturm und Drang’ works were
found to have been written over a longer period that he realised, and interspersed with
other, lighter pieces. Furthermore, Haydn was not the only Viennese composer writing
dark, passionate music at this time: Boccherini, Vanhal, Vogler, Mozart, and even
Pleyel all produced works in a similar vein, a fact which has led to Charles Rosen’s
paradoxical observation that ‘The [expressionistic] qualities of Haydn’s music that we
often find most astonishing today are oddly his least personal.’ 40
In the case of the op.20 fugues, will we find that their strangeness likewise
evaporates on closer acquaintance with the fugues that other contemporaries of Haydn
were also writing? Perhaps; and yet this account is not entirely satisfying—indeed, it
40 The Classical style, 2 nd ed. (London: Faber, 1976), p.111.
237