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

is not necessarily at variance with traditional practice: some expositions were regular,
some were not. Here the exposition is followed by an attractively fluid episode (bb.9-
13), with the next entry authentically displaced by half a bar. Soon, however, the
fugue begins to fall into a disconcertingly regular pattern, with two bar entries
followed by two bar episodes, thus: bb.24-27, 28-31, 32-35, 36-39, 42-45; then 57-60,
61-64, 65-68. The voices are genuinely independent most of the time, and yet this
fugue is even more vulnerable than Haydn’s op.20/2 fugue to the criticism voiced by J.
LaRue above about ‘the coordination of articulations approximately every two or four
bars’ (pp.230-1). The real trouble is Mozart’s dependence upon transposable modules
of one or two bar’s length. It is an unusual style, which would have stood him in good
stead had he ever decided to write a fugue on a ‘B-A-C-H’ subject, which (as the
fugues of Robert Schumann show) tends to encourage such stepwise modulations. He
did not, however, and the rest of his fugues were in a more conventional—perhaps
more sustainable—style.
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