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

violated that the fugue ceases, thus, to be a work of art’, 123 but in actual fact Clementi
has extended the tonal language with considerable tact. On the other hand, Wesley’s
‘Sonata with a Fugue’ (pp.186-93) ranges in a quite uninhibited manner over a
similarly wide range of keys without the slightest concern for fugal orthodoxy—or,
indeed, for tonal coherence (what would Nägeli have thought of this movement?) As
we have seen, Beethoven had considerable respect for the normal limitations of fugal
writing, but he now sought to work on a scale that required a wider range of possible
tonal relationships, a scale, moreover, that would need something of the long-range
tonal objectives and contrasts of his sonata style.
This was not so much an issue where, as in the finale of op.101 or the first
movement of op.106, the fugue served as a development section. The thematic
argument in op.101 is sufficiently dense and involving for us not to notice that we
have remained in the orbit of C major/A minor throughout. 124 It is a different matter
when we come to the construction of an entire movement on fugal principles. There is
a sense, perhaps, that Beethoven is here stretching fugue beyond its ‘natural’ limits. J.
S. Bach had been able to generate hundreds of examples within his understanding of
the genre, without becoming mechanical and formulaic; each of Beethoven’s is sui
generis, absolutely unrepeatable. ‘Mere fugality’, in the academic sense of the
Albrechtsberger exercises was not enough; ‘mere fugality’ in the transcendent sense of
J. S. Bach was not a possibility. For fugue to be a valid component of Beethoven’s
style at this stage, it needed to be superheated, infused with an expressive content that
he could only see as something alien: ‘To make a fugue requires no particular skill; in
my study days I made dozens of them. But the fancy wishes also to assert its
privileges, and today a new and really poetical element must be introduced into the old
123 Vorlesungen über Musik (Zurich and Stuttgart, 1826), quoted in Plantinga, Clementi, p.82.
124 The tonal course of this movement as a whole, in fact, contains nothing that would have raised
eyebrows in 1770. Its style and texture, of course, is another matter.
381