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

Junker and others were neither particularly representative nor influential. 43 There was
one exception to this: north German critics could never get used to his predilection for
two-part counterpoint in octaves: ‘Whether, however, his minuets in octaves are to
every man’s taste is something I will leave undecided. They are good for amusement;
but one easily gets the idea that one is hearing father and son begging by singing
octaves: and that is a bad object for musical imitation’ 44
Nevertheless, we also know that Haydn was distinctly sensitive to such
negative criticism as there was—perhaps because of its proximity to his admired C. P.
E. Bach? The earliest of his autobiographical accounts, a letter dating from 1776,
contains the following revealingly defensive paragraph: ‘In the chamber-music style I
have been fortunate enough to please almost all nations except the Berliners; this is
shown by the public newspapers and letters. I only wonder that the Berlin gentlemen,
who are otherwise so reasonable, preserve no medium in their criticism of my music,
for in one weekly paper they praise me to the skies, whilst in another they dash me
sixty fathoms deep into the earth.’ 45
As we have noted, Berlin was not itself a hotbed of fugal chamber music.
Nevertheless, Haydn will have been aware of the contrapuntal bent of much north-
German theory (notably Marpurg’s Abhandlung von der Fuge and Kirnberger’s Die
Kunst des reinen Satzes), and perhaps could see no better way of definitively asserting
the seriousness of his intent. If this was indeed so, it is hardly surprising that this set
should, exceptionally, contain two minor-key works. Even apart from the fugues it
was the most densely contrapuntal set he had written.
But he may have been proving something to himself, as well. During the mid
to late 1760s a noticeable expansion can be seen throughout Haydn’s music, first of all
43 German music criticism in the late eighteenth century: aesthetic issues in instrumental music
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), especially ch. 3 ‘Answering with a German voice’
and ch. 6 ‘The reign of genius’.
44 Hamburger Unterhaltungen, 1766; in Landon, Chronicle and works, II, p.132.
45 Landon: Chronicle and works, II, p.398.
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