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

kind experimentalism of Samuel Wesley and Anton Reicha. I mean instead the
generation of composers who made the transition from the Baroque to the Classical
style, equally at home with the old counterpoint and the new homophony—composers
like Franz Xaver Richter, Georg Matthias Monn, Carl Heinrich Graun, and the
grandfather of the galant, Georg Philipp Telemann. For us, fugal composition in the
second quarter of the eighteenth century is inextricably bound up with the achievement
of J. S. Bach and Handel. For their contemporaries, however, it was Telemann—the
phenomenally successful music director at Hamburg, first choice for the post of
Thomaskantor, dedicatee of the first volume of Marpurg’s Abhandlung von der Fuge
—who best represented their attitudes to fugue. Able to combine contrapuntal solidity
with galant elegance, free of scholastic pedantry, his fugal style was a sign of things to
come.
FUGUE AND THE GALANT: G. P. TELEMANN
In the 1730s, while Bach was working on the second part of the WTC and the
first three volumes of his Clavier-Übung, Telemann published his own set of fugues:
XX kleine Fugen, so wohl auf der Orgel, als auf dem Claviere zu spielen, nach
besonderen Modis verfasset, which he dedicated to Benedetto Marcello. 33 In some
respects these are very curious pieces; they are indeed modal, and each fugue is
preceded by a series of chords that prefigure the tonal course of the movement. 34
But it is not their unusual features I want to draw attention to, so much as the
way in which they are representative of the future of fugue in general. Richard
Petzoldt draws a very clear opposition between Telemann’s fugal aesthetic and that of
33 Nearly the entire corpus of his published keyboard music—these fugues, the three dozen Fantasias,
six Fugues légères et petits jeux, 48 fugirende und veraendernde Choraele, and a (lost) ‘Lustiger
Mischmasch’—dates from this decade.
34 See R. Rodman, ‘Retrospection and reduction: modal middlegrounds and foreground elaborations in
Telemann’s Zwanzig kleine Fugen’, Indiana Theory Review 15/1 (Spring 1994), 105-37.
31