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

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and back without a sign that anything out of the ordinary has happened. It is not,<br />

however, fifth-related movement that here gets Mozart from one key to the next.<br />

Instead, this movement shows an extraordinary predilection for stepwise sequences,<br />

both ascending and descending. Why such a dependence on rosalia?<br />

A possible answer can be seen in the fugues of Eberlin. Like virtually every<br />

late-Baroque composer, Eberlin’s style was heavily dependent upon sequential writing.<br />

If his use of this device was seldom as perfectly judged as that of Bach or Handel,<br />

neither was it as tedious and mechanical as that of the lesser Kleinmeister. Unusual,<br />

however, is the way his fugues depend so much on stepwise sequential transpositions.<br />

In the G major fugue (eighth out of the IX toccate e fughe), for example, bb.27-29<br />

present the same cadence first in E minor, then in D major, then in C. The three<br />

succeeding bars show the same procedure in reverse; taking a new cadential figure<br />

from C to D back up to E minor. None of this takes us out of the normal tonal orbit;<br />

but in bb.36-38 a similar procedure is used to engineer a more interesting shift<br />

(Ex.4.3):<br />

This time the transposed module is one and a half bars long. Emerging out of<br />

an interrupted cadence (V-VI) in E minor, it travels by means of G major to a cadence<br />

in D. Unexpectedly, however, this cadence is in the minor, and this enables Eberlin to<br />

repeat the whole passage a tone lower, cadencing on C by way of F major—an<br />

260

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