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

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ABSTRACT<br />

‘After’ can be taken both as an indication of chronology (after 1750), and with the<br />

meaning ‘in imitation of’. When we compare the fugues of Bach to those of later<br />

eighteenth-century epigones such as J. L. Krebs, Albrechtsberger, and Clementi, it is<br />

striking how works apparently so similar should be accorded such differing cultural<br />

significance. Concepts such as ‘inspiration’ or ‘originality’ (or conversely<br />

‘derivative’, ‘unimaginative’) may be useful critical shortcuts; but how far can we<br />

ground this kind of distinction analytically in the musical texts themselves? Chapter 1:<br />

‘Fine Distinctions’ approaches this question from the opposite end, so to speak,<br />

through the reception histories of two works attributed to Bach himself—BWV 534<br />

and 565—but now thought to be of doubtful authenticity. The chapter continues with<br />

the immediate tradition of the Bach circle, as represented by W. F. Bach and J. L.<br />

Krebs.<br />

Chapter 2: ‘Converting the Handelians’ begins with a similar comparison<br />

between Handel and his successors, before turning to Samuel Wesley and his response<br />

first of all to Handel’s dominating influence, then to the immense impression that J. S.<br />

Bach’s music had upon him.<br />

Questions of canonicity emerge in a different way with chapter 3: ‘Classical<br />

style, Classical ideology, and the instrumental fugues of Joseph Haydn’. Haydn’s<br />

fugues are discussed with a view to their problematic location in the grand narrative of<br />

the development of the Viennese Classical style—the strong sense of evolutionary<br />

teleology present in the accounts of Sandberger, Rosen, et al is contrasted with the<br />

revisionist approach of James Webster.<br />

Chapter 4: ‘Mozart, finished and unfinished’ explores Mozart’s curious<br />

inability or unwillingness to complete so many of his fugal fragments. Several<br />

3

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