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

against itself, augmented and inverted, in the bass. The one question one could raise
about Sechter’s completion is whether Mozart might have planned to exploit the
thematic significance of the cadence in bb.17-19 and 24-26 later in the piece—
although as we have noted questions of intent in fugal writing are often problematic.
The main trouble with divining Mozart’s intentions for the future direction of this
piece may well be that he didn’t have any. Did Mozart see the latent possibilities of
the subject which Sechter was to uncover? Perhaps not. The work that Stadler did on
the sonata movements that we discussed above had a certain element of ‘clairvoyance’
about it, decoding the implications of an exposition so as to supply a recapitulation and
perhaps a development. Fugal forms are not predictive in this way. Simon Sechter
took a fresh look at where Mozart had ground to a halt, found perhaps more potential
in the material than Mozart had, and finished the fugue by seamlessly extending
Mozart’s texture in his own fashion.
The fugue in E flat, K.153/375f, also completed by Sechter, is the only one
with a noticably ‘tuneful’ subject, characterised by a descending scale of nearly two
octaves. It might be thought that this would be difficult to manage in a fugal texture,
but it fits in well with the fluid, scalar motion of the other voices. As in K.154/385k,
Mozart abandoned the movement after the exposition, just at the point of the first entry
in another key. Sechter continued along Mozart’s lines, using the same subsidiary
material, finding opportunity for one—not quite exact—stretto, and finishing with an
unexpectedly galant cadence.
Although both fugues stopped at the same point, it is not clear why this is so;
whether Mozart ran into difficulties or lost interest. The question occurs even more
acutely with the G minor fugue K.401(375e). Why, having written ninety-five bars
and surely taken the fugue as far as he intended, did Mozart not spend the few minutes
it would have taken to bring the movement to a satisfactory conclusion? He may of
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