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

so long [‘quite half an hour’] in such an exceedingly uncomfortable position [sitting to
one side of Ries at the piano]. His rapt involvement made him totally oblivious to
external sensations.’ 21 Only a dubious account by Ignaz von Seyfried emphasises
Beethoven’s contrapuntal wizardry, describing how Mozart set him ‘a chromatic fugue
motive, in which the countersubject of a double fugue lay concealed, al rovescio.’
Needless to say, ‘Beethoven was not one to be deceived . . . having instantly divined
its secret meaning.’ 22 This seems unlikely, not just because the story has a number of
demonstrable inaccuracies, 23 but because the few surviving examples of Beethoven’s
early fugal writing tell a different tale.
BEETHOVEN’S CONTRAPUNTAL EDUCATION
Seyfried’s anecdote has to be ascribed to 1787, the only year in which
Beethoven could possibly have met Mozart (by the time he returned to Vienna in 1792,
Mozart was dead); but the contrapuntal work of this period shows no trace of this sort
of contrapuntal wizardry. In the Fugue in C, Hess 64 (?1794), for example, his
intuitive sense of harmony 24 enables him to write a reasonably effective (and fugal-
sounding) piece of music, but the imitative structure is distinctly loose. The rather odd
answer is real where one would expect it to be tonal (b.3), and idiosyncratically altered
where we might have expected to be literal (b.4; see Ex.5.3).
21 Kirkendale, Fugue and fugato, p.223.
22 Ibid., p.222.
23 Beethoven’s trip to Vienna was in 1787, not 1790, as Seyfried states, and he came not just to hear
Mozart, but to study with him.
24 ‘So far as mistakes are concerned it was never necessary for me to learn thorough-bass; my feelings
were so sensitive from childhood that I practiced counterpoint without knowing that it must be so or
could be otherwise.’ (Note on a sheet containing directions for the use of fourths in suspensions—
probably intended for the instruction of Archduke Rudolph): Beethoven: the man and the artist, as
revealed in his own words ed. F. Kerst and H. E. Krebhiel (New York: Dover, 1964), p.27.
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