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

CHAPTER 5
FUGUE IN BEETHOVEN:
MUNDANE AND TRANSCENDENTAL COUNTERPOINT
BACH AND BEETHOVEN
From time to time Providence sends into the world heroes who seize in a mighty grasp the artistic
tradition that has passed comfortably from master to pupil, from one generation to the next; purify
and transform it; and thus shape something novel. This new art continues for many years to serve as
a model without losing its taste of novelty or its ability to shock contemporaries by its sheer power,
while the heroic originator becomes the bright focal point of his age and its taste. 1
The writer is Carl Maria von Weber, in 1821, supplying an article to J. S. Ersch and J.
G. Gruber’s Allgemeine Enzyklopädie der Wissenschaften und Kunst. His subject is
not Ludwig van Beethoven, but the very different composer Johann Sebastian Bach. 2
There are a number of points we can draw from Weber’s pioneering (and remarkably
perceptive) essay.
It is a good example of ‘the artist as Frankenstein’ rhetoric, in which Bach is
seen to animate and transform a passive, static tradition; although we should also note
that Weber’s continuation anticipates the main tendency of late nineteenth- and
twentieth-century Bach scholarship as well: ‘It is generally forgotten in such cases,
though quite unjustly, that these great men were at the same time also children of the
age in which they lived, and that their great achievements argue the previous existence
1 C. M. Weber, Writings on music, tr. M. Cooper, ed. J. Warrack (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1981), p.297.
2 As befits a highly original composer with a very different approach to music-making, Weber’s
attitude to Beethoven was complex and ambivalent. It was not however as negative as has been
thought (due to a series of misunderstandings and Schindler’s misrepresentation); see Weber,
Writings, pp.14-17, and R. Wallace, Beethoven’s critics: aesthetic dilemmas and resolutions during
the composer’s lifetime,. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp.110-4.
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