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

A canon at the fourth below, ‘we have a case of polytonality, but Bach has so adjusted
his progressions (by the choice at the critical moment of notes common to two keys)
that while the right hand is doubtless quite under the impression that the piece is in D
minor ... and the left hand that it is in A minor ... the listener feels that it is
homogeneous in key, though rather fluctuating from moment to moment’; 107 later on
this Duetto becomes a canon by inversion, which leads Bach into the vicinity of F
minor with results as strange as anything in Clementi. One might well ask: if Bach can
get away with it, why not Clementi? And so again we come back to the question of
creative license and authority: Clementi’s contrapuntal textures are evaluated against
our existing aesthetic criteria—while J. S. Bach’s music had a large hand in shaping
these criteria.
The strangest point about these canons lies not in their harmony, however, but
in the melody. Temperley makes an important observation in this connection,
speaking of ‘Clementi’s ingenuity in bending the severe restrictions of canonic writing
to accommodate the melodic and harmonic expectations of the nineteenth-century
listener.’ 108 In other words, unlike his fugues, the canons are not neo-Baroque
pastiches plain and simple (there was in any case hardly a comparable tradition of
canonic writing for keyboard). They show a surprisingly wide range of mood and
tempi; the material is often—at least potentially—‘tuneful’; but there is something
odd about the melodic writing all the same. An attempt to hum through the line
reveals the source of the peculiarity at once: there is nowhere to breathe—the caesurae
and cadences which give definition to a normal melodic line are almost completely
absent. This really is a kind of ‘endless melody’, although no doubt it was not quite
what Wagner had in mind.
107 P. Scholes, Oxford Companion to Music, p.449. This piece was famously referenced by Darius
Milhaud as one of the origins of his polytonality. It is likely that Clementi knew it as well; Daw,
‘Clementi’, 73, shows a copy by Clementi of the last of these Duetti.
108 Temperley, Introduction, p.xvii.
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