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

tags and pseudo- species counterpoint. The real joke for contemporary listeners,
however, would have been the way in which the popular tune from Beethoven’s ballet
The Creatures of Prometheus is at first withheld and only gradually allowed to come
to the fore (with programmatic implications, perhaps?) And, to be sure, in this set of
variations and its companion op.34, Beethoven was indeed reshaping the genre in a
truly Promethean manner.
Apart from the canonic first half of variation VII and some effective if loose
invertible counterpoint in the minor variation XIV the texture could hardly be
described as contrapuntal until we reach the ‘Finale. Alla Fuga’, which is the most
substantial piece of fugal writing since Beethoven’s studies. His sense of fugal
tonality remains highly orthodox. As perhaps befits a variation set where everything
has remained in E flat throughout, entries occur on I, V, ii, vi, iii, and IV in the
approved Baroque manner, and this describes the entire tonal ambit. The one brief
exception occurs in b.62, where the reference to the Prometheus theme per arsin et
thesin 50 appears on VI, before it is reinterpreted as V/ii. This tonal conservatism
makes an interesting contrast to his previous publication, the op.34 variations in F,
which had a highly original tonal scheme of descending thirds with no two successive
variations sharing the same key.
Beethoven’s op.35 fugue is remarkable for two things. By comparison with the
rather conservative keyboard fugues of the previous fifty years, its free and easy
keyboard style makes full use of the growing resources of nineteenth-century pianism.
Octave doubling, sforzandi, and strong dynamic contrasts abound, and the full range of
the piano (as it stood at the time) is exploited. The counterpoint is rough but effective,
and seems tailor made for the instrument’s percussive quality (Ex.5.8):
50 With the position of strong and weak beats reversed, a permutation also seen in the Eroica
symphony.
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