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

Mozart continued the fugue until its ninety-fifth bar, at which point Maximilian
Stadler took over, supplying a further eight bars to complete the movement. Just as his
completion of the C minor ‘Fantasia’ has been criticised for showing too much
Beethoven, so has this passage suffered (now that we know how far it pre-dates 1782)
for sounding too much like Bach. 26 Consisting of little more than a brief dominant
pedal point followed by a tonic pedal with two incomplete subdominant entries, it is
hard to see how it would have room to develop a stylistic identity of its own. It even
makes use of the distinctive dotted crotchet/two semiquavers idea which dominates so
much of the fugue; and yet there is a difference. When Mozart uses this motive, the
melodic line moves in a single direction, up or down as the case may be. In Stadler’s
completion, it turns back on itself, (Ex.4.4) recalling the dactylic pattern which we
recognise as a Bachian fingerprint from the third Brandenburg concerto, the fugue of
WTC I in C minor and countless other pieces. The chains of suspensions in bb.96-98
are another new element, but are sufficiently generic not to seem irrelevant. Even if the
26 W. Plath, Neue Mozart-Ausgabe, IX 27/2: Einzelstücke für Klavier, Vorwort, pp.xviii-xix.
263