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

Beethoven’s course of study with Albrechtsberger concluded in May 1795—
the same month his op.1, three piano trios dedicated to Prince Lichnowsky, appeared.
In other words, his contrapuntal training was completed before he officially entered the
public arena as a composer. This (and the years he had spent revising them) go some
way toward explaining the immensely confident and ‘finished’ impression that even
these first works make.
It is not, of course, fair to compare Beethoven’s opp.1-5 with the first works of
Haydn or Mozart. Beethoven entered upon his op.1 with the same care and
preparation he showed in every new venture, even giving thought to the eventual shape
of his oeuvre (he had already published a number of sets of variations, none of which
he had dignified with an opus number). Haydn came by publication almost
accidentally (see p.218), and many of Mozart’s most important works remained in
manuscript until after his death, as discussed in the previous chapter. Furthermore, the
musical language which Haydn and Mozart came upon was much less clearly formed
than that which Beethoven found, the expectations of size and musical weight less
demanding—a sonata or trio was a very different thing in 1795 from what it had been
in 1760. Like most of their contemporaries, Haydn and Mozart were necessarily less
single-minded in their contrapuntal studies than Beethoven was able to be. From
Griesinger and Dies we have vivid images of the young Haydn, near starvation,
struggling to master Fuxian counterpoint at the same time as the rudiments of
composition, writing his first sonatas and serenades, and teaching to keep body and
soul together. 40 As for Mozart, when and how did he study counterpoint? We know
how he taught, in considerable detail, but nowhere in the extensive documentation of
40 Later in life he was to become an expert in Fuxian counterpoint, at times even improving on Fux’s
Gradus: see A. Mann, ‘Haydn as student and critic of Fux’ in Studies in eighteenth-century music. A
tribute to Karl Geiringer on his seventieth birthday, ed. H. C. R. Landon (London: Allen and Unwin,
1970), 323-32.
329