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

traditional form.’ 125 Weber expressed a similar idea in his unfinished novel
Tonkünstlers Leben, in the form of a dialogue thus:
Diehl: ‘...I should have thought that [strict fugal writing] needed no great effort of your
imagination, only a first-class knowledge of your Kirnberger, your Fux, your Wolf or whatever the
brutes are called.’
Myself: ‘Oh! no, actually it’s in abstract work such as this that one has most need of one’s
feelings to act as guides, so that one doesn’t founder in the dry sands of boredom, misled by mere
academic fluency.’ 126
This distinction between, shall we say, ‘art’ fugue and academic fugue seems to
have been a commonplace of contemporary criticism. But how was a composer to
indicate unambiguously that he was writing fugue not as an academic but as an artist?
The finale to the Sonata in A flat, op.110, is an illustration of how Beethoven
introduced the harmonic range and radical discontinuities of his late style into his fugal
style. Like a number of his later movements, it is an interlocking structure of two
tempi (compare the first movement of the sonata op.109, the finale of the quartet
op.127, the first movement of the quartet op.130, the first movement and ‘Heiliger
Dankgesang’ of the quartet op.132.) Parallels could also be drawn with the finale of
Clementi’s Sonata in B minor, op.40/2—perhaps even the G minor sonata, op.34/2.
By contrast with Clementi’s clear, almost schematic boundaries between movements,
however, Beethoven carefully smudges the join between this structure and the previous
Allegro molto. The Allegro concludes with an unexpectedly cloudy major chord,
which functions as a dominant to the beginning of the next section. There follows one
125 Thayer-Forbes, Beethoven, p.692.
126 Weber, Writings, p.357.
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