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

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his early life is there a single reference to regular contrapuntal training or practice. 41<br />

Leopold must have given him a certain amount of basic compositional training, but his<br />

real strength was the teaching of instrument technique; to a large extent Wolfgang<br />

seems to have been left to pick up his technique where he could, emulating the music<br />

he met in their travels.<br />

It is interesting to compare the state of Beethoven’s contrapuntal studies with<br />

those Mozart wrote late in his life, which we discussed in the previous chapter. Of<br />

Mozart’s many contrapuntal beginnings only a small proportion were completed, in<br />

contrast to the more than two hundred pages of Beethoven’s exercises for<br />

Albrechtsberger. There are a number of reasons for this. Most fundamental is the fact<br />

that Beethoven was working in a somewhat artificial style especially designed for<br />

pedagogical purposes—it takes no exceptional musical intelligence to ascend the<br />

conveniently graded levels, the ‘steps to Parnassus’ of Fux/Albrechtsberger’s method<br />

—while Mozart was seeking to emulate a style of matchless sophistication and<br />

individuality. Beethoven had a teacher—the best in Vienna—to advise and encourage<br />

him; Mozart had none. Mozart was a professional musician, (over-)engaged in a<br />

continual round of concerts, lessons, and commissions, supporting a family and<br />

struggling to make ends meet; private experiments with unfashionable styles had to be<br />

fitted in around these obligations. Beethoven, on the other hand, had been sent to<br />

Vienna for the express purpose of studying with Haydn. While his situation was not<br />

exactly luxurious, his salary was still being paid by the Bonn Elector and he was from<br />

the start able to find generous patrons to support him in a way that Mozart never had.<br />

41 See, however, B. Kohlsch Tter, ‘Die musikalische Ausbildung auf Salzburger Boden im 18.<br />

Jahrhundert’, Mozart und seine Umwelt: Bericht uber die Tagung des Zentralinstituts für<br />

Mozartforschung der Internationalen Stiftung Mozarteum Salzburg (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1979),<br />

200-02, which traces the Salzburg tradition of music theory (Samber, Muffat, Gugl, Eberlin,<br />

Adlgasser, etc). H. Federhofer, ‘Mozart als Schuler und Lehrer in der Musiktheorie’, Mozart-<br />

Jahrbuch (1973), 89-106, and A. Mann, ‘Leopold Mozart als Lehrer seines Sohnes’, Mozart-<br />

Jahrbuch (1989-1990), 31-35, emphasise the practical, contemporary orientation of Mozart’s<br />

education; this is no doubt the reason for his less than glorious showing before the Accademia<br />

Filarmonica in Bologna.<br />

330

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