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

one could call the non plus ultra) will know what that means.’ 8
Unlike Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven was brought up in north Germany, where
the conservative influence of Bach and his pupils remained strong. ‘Mr Neefe’
(Christian Gottlob Neefe, 1748-1798) wrote moderately important sonatas in the
manner of C. P. E. Bach, and had been taught by Johann Adam Hiller (1728-1804), a
successor of Bach’s at Leipzig. 9 As he did with Haydn and Mozart, Warren
Kirkendale has documented with remarkable thoroughness everything that is known
about Beethoven’s contact with and attitude towards earlier music, especially that of
Bach and Handel. 10 His participation in Baron van Swieten’s soirées, 11 his attempts to
secure a copy of the B minor Mass from Breitkopf and Härtel (1810) and Nägeli
(1824), his sketches for a ‘B-A-C-H’ overture (1822-25; perhaps as a companion for
the ‘Handelian’ overture Die Weihe des Hauses, op.124); his enthusiasm for a project
to raise money for Bach’s last surviving daughter, now in poverty—all these are well
enough known and need not be recounted here.
Less explicable than the way in which Beethoven came under the influence of
Bach is the way that Bach seems to have anticipated certain elements of Beethoven’s
creative personality. Throughout Bach’s oeuvre we come across a sense of artistic
ambition, of architectural scale and expressive range that we seek in vain among his
contemporaries and immediate predecessors. In particular his determination to
8 K. F. Cramer, ‘Louis van Betthoven’[sic], Magazin der Musik I (Hamburg, 1783; rpt. Hildesheim,
1971): 394-95; in A. W. Thayer, Life of Beethoven, rev. E. Forbes (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1967), pp.65-66, and many other places.
9 His teacher was Gottfried August Homilius (1714-1785), one of Bach’s more gifted pupils.
10 Kirkendale, Fugue and fugato in rococo and classical chamber music (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 1979), pp.206-24. See also D. MacArdle, ‘Beethoven and the Bach family’, Music
& Letters 38/4 (October 1957), 353-58; M. Zenck, Die Bach-Rezeption des späten Beethoven: Zum
Verhältnis von Musikhistoriographie und Rezeptionsgeschichtsschreibung der Klassik (Stuttgart:
Steiner, 1986); W. Kinderman, ‘Bach und Beethoven’, tr. T. Bösche, Bach und die Nachwelt. I:
1750-1850, ed. M. Heinemann and H.-J. Hinrichsen (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1997), pp.351-377;
and H.-W. Küthen, Beethoven und die Rezeption der Alten Musik: Die hohe Schule der
Überlieferung (Bonn: Beethoven-Haus; 2002).
11 Van Swieten was also the dedicatee of his first symphony, and it has been suggested that the opening
bars contain a deliberate allusion to this fact in the form of a hidden ‘B-A-C-H’ quotation (E.
Schenk, ‘Beethovens ‘Erste’—eine B-A-C-H-Symphonie’, Neues Beethoven-Jahrbuch 8 (1938),
162-72).
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