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

‘Metaphorically, Beethoven was already on many occasions deaf to the music of others
before his physical hearing became impaired.’ 47 The few (very few) musicians for
whom Beethoven expressed admiration were distanced from him by geography
(Cherubini, Clementi, Cramer, Kreutzer) or even more insuperable barriers (Bach,
Handel, Mozart). 48 To be sure, his earlier sonatas show the unmistakable influence of
the London pianoforte school, and there are traces of contemporary French opera in
Fidelio; but on the whole one gets the impression that Beethoven was simply not
particularly interested in other people’s music. His style would appear to have
developed according its own laws, rather than in response to particular commissions.
From the ‘new path’ of 1802 to the scribbled notes of intention in his later
sketchbooks, he seems to have been very much aware of this process. At the same
time, he shows a curious ambivalence about making these declarations public: ‘Instead
of making a fuss about a new method of v[ariations] such as would be made by our
neighbours the Gallo-Franks, such as, for instance, when a certain French composer
presented fugues to me après une nouvelle Méthode, which resulted in this, that the
fugue is no longer a fugue, etc.—I nevertheless want to bring to the attention of the
non-connoisseur the fact that these V.[ariations] [opp.34 and 35] are at any rate
different from any others.’ 49
It is in the second of these two sets that we come across Beethoven’s first
significant published fugue. Already it is a long way from the Albrechtsberger
exercises—there is nothing smooth or conventional about the texture; nor, for that
matter about the variations as a whole. The opening of the set is humorous on a
number of levels. Apart from the cryptic absurdity of the naked bass itself, the
introduction is a poker-faced parody of contrapuntal exercise, complete with Latinate
47 E. Blom, ‘The minor composers’, Music & Letters 8/3 (July 1927), 311.
48 Seen in this light, his ambivalent relationship with Haydn—the one towering figure in disturbing
proximity—makes a certain amount of sense.
49 Letter to Breitkopf und Härtel, 26 Dec, 1802; in Thayer-Forbes, Beethoven, p.320. The prefatory
note he wanted was never published; did he change his mind?
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