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

sonatas, there is a certain fitness in that Stadler also dedicated his completion to her.
The autograph breaks off after b.28, at the end of the exposition, and Stadler is
composer rather than arranger from this point onward, supplying both development
and recapitulation. If his recapitulation is nearly as ‘regular’ as that of K.400/372a, the
development is a bold, richly pianistic expansion of the opening theme. It is, perhaps,
more characteristic of its own time (1802) than Mozart’s (?1782). Taken on its own
terms it is an effective, harmonically inventive piece of writing, but, for Richard
Kramer, Stadler’s completion ‘plays against the grain of Mozart’s voice at every turn’;
‘it is tempting to imagine that Stadler was hearing Mozart through the filter of
Beethoven’s recent music’. 16 How should we characterise Stadler’s contribution? Did
he transform Mozart’s abortive violin sonata into a romantic Charakterstück against its
will, so to speak? Or did he merely reinforce and develop the proto-romanticism
inherent in the original fragment? Stadler’s work may well be at odds with what we
guess to have been Mozart’s intentions—not least because Mozart appears to have
given the piece up as a bad job; but should we not then be grateful to Stadler for
transforming Mozart’s insoluble problem into a magnificent piece of keyboard
rhetoric?
Because of the way a sonata movement sets up expectations for large-scale
repetition, even a relatively short fragment can provide a fair amount of assistance to
the would-be completer. This is not true of fugal fragments, which give little
indication of their eventual course. 17 Attempting the completion of a fugal fragment is
a very different matter; scissors and paste are no help here. Stadler himself completed
three of Mozart’s fugues. Very little of Stadler’s music is available in print; but the
gritty chromatic D minor fugue published in Robin Langley’s anthology Classical
16 ‘Fragmente’ (review), 233.
17 There are of course fugues that make use of large-scale repetition; the ‘Wedge’ fugue in E minor
BWV 548 or the fugue in B flat major from WTC II, but on the whole this is as true of the somewhat
more relaxed southern German and Italian traditions as of central and north Germany. It has been
suggested the clear ternary design of BWV 537 stems from just such an attempt at completion,
possibly by J. L. Krebs (see p.40, fn.6).
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