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

organ music: from the death of J. S. Bach to the advent of Mendelssohn 18 shows that
he was no amateur when it came to fugal writing.
The smallest contribution he had to make was eight bars at the end of Mozart’s
ninety-five bar fugue in G minor, K.401/375e. This fugue, perhaps the earliest of
Mozart’s surviving fugues for keyboard, was once thought to have been written in
1782, the year Baron van Swieten first introduced him to the music of Bach and
Handel. 19 The texture is almost aggressively fugal, without the slightest relapse into
pretty galant ear-tickling; Mozart is thoroughly in earnest here. The integrity of the
four voices is preserved carefully throughout; when a voice leaves the texture, it only
re-enters with the subject, in accordance with the strictest practice of J. S. Bach and
Fux. Even more archaic is the way the fugue falls into two sections at bb.45-6: an
imperfect cadence leads to a new exposition of the subject, now inverted, for all the
world like a seventeenth-century ricercar. The subject itself is worthy of J. S. Bach.
Lithe and flexible, yet perfectly balanced, it is one of the best Mozart ever chose for a
keyboard fugue (Ex.4.1):
There is no regular countersubject, but the counterpoint is built almost entirely
out of two kinds of material: smooth conjunct quaver lines derived from the last four
notes of the subject, and dactylic semiquaver motives derived from the end of the first
18 Vol. I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
19 Other (lost) fugues are mentioned in Leopold’s catalogue of his son’s works. There is also a seven
bar fragment of a fugue in D, K.73w; originally thought to have been written in Bologna (1770);
according to W. Plath the handwriting indicates a date of 1772-3.
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