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

place in Telemann’s musical sensibility: a new awareness of the musical possibilities
of melodic writing for its own sake, not just as part of a contrapuntal combination.
Perhaps inevitably, this awareness was accompanied by a loss in sensitivity to the
specific virtues of fugal technique. If in the case of Ex.0.5 it only served to dilute the
fugal structure (in an attractive, easy-going way) it was this new sensibility that would
in time also give rise to the greatest achievements of the Viennese Classics.
To return once more to Richard Wagner:
There was a time in Germany when folk knew Music from no other side than Erudition—it was the
age of Sebastian Bach. But it then was the form wherein one looked at things in general, and in his
deeply-pondered fugues Bach told a tale as vigorous as Beethoven now tells us in the freest
symphony. The difference was this: those people knew no other forms, and the composers of that
time were truly learned. To-day both sides have changed. The forms have become freer, kindlier, we
have learnt to live,—and our composers no longer are learned. 40
Much was lost, and much was gained. But it is not true that the composers of
the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were entirely unlearned. Virtually
all of them had, as part of their basic compositional equipment, a thorough grounding
in counterpoint and fugue. And most of them left—for professional, personal, or
technical reasons—examples of this archaic genre. It is our task here, in these pages,
to explore how their fugues coexisted and interacted with the ‘freer, kindlier’ forms of
their own age.
40 Wagner, ‘Deutsche Oper’, 57.
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