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

tempting to make inferences from this sort of artistic coitus interruptus to the nature of
their married life. Since the marriage appears to have been generally happy and
affectionate, biographers have been forced to posit the absence of a ‘deeper’
connection: ‘that there was limitless comprehension between these two it is impossible
to imagine. Mozart—there is no getting away from it—can never have known a love
that was commensurate with his infinite capacity for it—the capacity of a supreme
artist.’ 40 Constanze has had to endure an extraordinary amount of opprobrium from
Mozart’s biographers on account of not being another Clara Schumann. 41 And yet the
incompleteness of these works does not have to be taken as a reflection upon their
marriage.
BETWEEN TWO FUGAL CULTURES
Matthew Dirst has advanced another—very plausible—explanation in chapter
2 of his study ‘Bach’s “Well-tempered Clavier” in musical thought and practice, 1750-
1850’, 42 outlining Mozart’s shift between two fugal cultures. Almost from the start of
his travels, Mozart had impressed listeners by his ability to improvise fugues:
Some of those present whispered to the Dean [of Augsburg Cathedral] that he ought to hear me play
in the organ style. I asked him to give me a theme, which he declined, but one of the monks did so. I
handled it quite leisurely, and all at once (the fugue being in G minor) I brought in a lively
movement in the major key, but in the same tempo, and then at the end the original subject, only
reversed. At last it occurred to me to employ the lively movement for the subject of the fugue also, I
did not hesitate long, but did so at once, and it went as accurately as if Daser 43 had taken its measure.
40 E. Blom, Mozart (London: Dent, 1935), p.120; what supreme artistic capacity has to do with an
‘infinite capacity for love’ is not clear.
41 Arthur Schurig’s assertion that ‘the marriage robbed his artistic fertility of its intensity’ is bizarre in
the extent to which it flies in the face of the usual view of Mozart’s creative trajectory.
42 PhD diss., Stanford University (1996).
43 A Salzburg tailor.
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