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

sentimental’ (c.1814?), Haydn’s acquaintance Anton Reicha quotes a conversation in
which Haydn is supposed to have said that ‘after having written many works, he began
again, at the age of forty [i.e. around the time op.20 was being written], a complete
course in composition, to strengthen himself in his art and to learn its secrets better.’ 48
This remark is the basis of Mark Evan Bonds’ ‘Haydn’s “Cours complet de la
composition” and the Sturm und Drang’, which reinterprets the apparent disruption of
Haydn’s ‘Sturm und Drang’ works as ‘a period of intense, quasi-systematic
exploration.’ 49 An obscure anecdote from Reicha, recorded after Haydn’s death,
would seem to be a flimsy foundation for much conjecture; but it does square with
what we know about Haydn’s personality. More of a problem with Bonds’ argument
is the way in which just about any feature of interest in the music of this time can be
taken to be part of this ‘cours complet’; he himself refers to passages of harmonic
experiment, unusual choices of keys, canon and cancrizans, variation and varied
reprise, thematic elaboration and monothematicism, cyclical forms, and a ‘heightened
awareness of the audience’—it is hard to imagine a characteristic that might not be
eligible. If Reicha’s account is at all accurate, however, the most obvious
interpretation of Haydn’s decision to ‘strengthen himself in his art and to learn its
secrets better’ would be just such an engagement with strict counterpoint as we find
here in op.20.
Joseph Haydn left no diaries, no essays or manifestos, and few letters—only
some recollections from very late in his life. All in all we have very little in the way of
statements about his musical intentions, and even that little is cryptic or ambiguous. A
uniquely opaque creative personality, most of what we gather about his artistic
purposes has to be inferred from the works themselves. As we have seen, there are a
number of ways in which we might account for the genesis of the op.20 fugues. Were
48 M. E. Bonds, ‘Haydn’s “Cours complet de la composition” and the Sturm und Drang’, Haydn
Studies 1998, 162.
49 Ibid., 176.
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