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

None of these, in any case, remotely match the ambition and expressive scope
of Beethoven’s late fugues. From his middle period onward the structural centre of
gravity of his works shifted increasingly toward the end, away from the first movement
—for the first time the finale became a problem. 122 Until the time of Haydn and
Mozart, it had been enough to round off a cycle with a lighter movement: a rondo or
set of variations perhaps, or (in a sonata) a minuet. For Beethoven, however (and,
even more problematically, for Beethoven’s successors), the finale increasingly had to
sum up, to transcend—indeed, to apotheosise—the emotional content of the rest of the
piece. Fugue, with its thematic and motivic density, not to mention its archaic
resonances, was one possible answer to the problem. This solution, however, created
problems of its own. Fugue, especially in the hands of J. S. Bach, was a concentrated
rather than expansive genre. In his autographs, most of the WTC fugues fit on a single
page. The longer organ fugues are generally achieved either though sectional
structures (BWV 552—several fugues in one), or the introduction of concerto
elements. Likewise, the fugues which conclude Haydn’s op.20/2, 5, and 6 are
considerably shorter than an equivalent rondo or sonata movement would have been.
How, then, to construct a fugue large enough to serve as a finale sufficiently weighty
for one of Beethoven’s late cycles?
In part this was a question of tonality. The usual Baroque cycle of related keys
had been enough to sustain fugues up to normal eighteenth-century length; but was
there any way of expanding this range to accommodate the expanded tonal vocabulary
of the sonata style? We have seen a number of experiments in this line. Clementi’s
Fugue in C (Gradus no.13; discussed p.370 above) covers a good deal of tonal ground
—Hans Georg Nägeli commented that ‘the relationships between the keys are so
122 W. S. Newman, The sonata since Beethoven (New York: W.W. Norton, 1983), pp.145-48, 162-64.
About the problematic histories of nearly all of Beethoven’s late finales see also M. Solomon’s
‘Beethoven’s ninth symphony: the sense of an ending’, Critical Inquiry 17/2 (Winter 1991), 289-305
(also in Late Beethoven: music, thought, imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2003), pp.213-28.
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