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

course have been distracted or interrupted—we will never know—but he never
returned to it as he certainly would have if it had been an important commission.
Today, a composer will often start with an idea (thematic, textural, timbral, or
whatever) and work outward from this point to the finished piece, much in the manner
of the Scotsman who found a button and had a suit made to match. With the
completed work, then, he or she has to find a performer, an occasion, and a public. 53 It
has to be admitted that the supply of modern ‘composed’ or ‘classical’ music now
considerably exceeds the demand. Eighteenth-entury composers began at the other
end, with the occasion, whether it be a private evening musicale, a public concert, a
court opera, or a church service (or at least, especially toward the end of the century,
with a commercial musical public). This naturally included an awareness of who the
performers would be, not to mention the particular tastes of a given patron or public.
Before a single note had been written, therefore, many of the most important
parameters of the piece had already been laid down. This sort of external
determination might well be intolerable to many composers today; to Mozart, and
Haydn, and virtually all of their contemporaries, it was the core of their vocation. 54 In
Paris, for example, (and we know what a low opinion he had of the French public) we
see Mozart revelling in his ability to negotiate with their tastes, alternately frustrating
and gratifying their expectations:
—the symphony began. Raaff was standing beside me, and just in the middle of the first Allegro
there was passage which I felt sure must please. The audience were quite carried away—and there
was a tremendous burst of applause. But as I knew, when I wrote it, what effect it would surely
produce, I had introduced the passage again at the close—when there were shouts of ‘Da capo’. The
53 This is overstating the case a little. New works continue to be commissioned by ensembles and
artistic organisations; but the creative process is usually much the same.
54 There are a few eighteenth-century musicians who composed only in response to the dictates of
inspiration: notably J. G. Müthel (1728-1788), and perhaps W. F. Bach; but however prophetic they
may have been of nineteenth-century attitudes, they remain thoroughly marginal figures within the
eighteenth century.
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