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

movement. There is no danger of irrelevance, because the canon is built out of a little
three-note upbeat figure which had gradually come into significance during the first
section. The way in which this figure emerges from the cadence to initiate the canon is
one of the most beautifully negotiated transitions in all of Clementi.
For a proper understanding of Clementi’s fugal style, however, we must look
beyond the sonatas, to his Gradus ad Parnassum (1817-26). Like Fux’s work of the
same name, it has suffered from a reputation for barren scholasticism 100 —not least
because Carl Tausig’s edition of twenty-nine of the most mechanical of the études is
the form in which it has chiefly been known. The purpose and nature of the work was
thereby totally misrepresented. Clementi may have intended the Gradus to be his
magnum opus, a comprehensive summary of his total keyboard achievement—in
which it largely succeeds. Ultimately, the only reason it has not the cultural weight of,
say, the Clavier-Übung, is that the creative achievement it summarises is that of Muzio
Clementi rather than J. S. Bach. Unlike J. B. Cramer’s Studio of 1809 or Chopin’s
opp.10 and 25, it does not consist entirely of what we would now call ‘études’: that is,
single-movement pieces exploiting one kind of texture or figure throughout for the
purpose of technical development. Instead (in the spirit of Bach’s Clavier-Übung,
which means simply ‘keyboard exercise[s]’) Clementi’s Gradus includes sonata-like
movements, fantasies, proto-Romantic Charakterstücke, fugues, and canons, as well as
obvious technical exercises. A clear line is not drawn between these genres; some of
the ‘sonata’ movements (no.38 and 49, for example) have more extensive passage-
work than would be typical in his sonatas even of this period, 101 and many of the
études are in sonata form. Likewise, as Moscheles and Chopin were soon to show,
there is nothing to prevent an étude from being a Charakterstück if it has sufficient
100 In recent years the reputation of Fux has been rehabilitated by A. Mann, H. Schenker, S.
Wollenberg, H. Federhofer, R. Flotzinger, and many others, just as interest in Clementi has been
revived by J. Shedlock, G. de Saint-Foix, L. Plantinga, and W. S. Newman.
101 Nicholas Temperley ascribes this to the influence of Dussek (Introduction, p.xvii), but it is hard not
to associate it with the obviously ‘technical’ nature of so many of the other movements.
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