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

CONCLUSION
‘Like most other disciplines, literary criticism swings back and forth between a desire
to do small-scale jobs well and carefully and a desire to paint the great big picture’
says Richard Rorty. 1 The same is true of musical criticism. This study has been more
of a series of small-scale jobs done carefully and—I hope—well, than any grand,
embracing narrative. Sustained analytical critique of individual pieces (and it is
possible to write in much greater detail than has been attempted here) is naturally in
tension with the possibility of doing justice to any wider context. I have to admit that,
for me, the interest I find in the works themselves, with all their uniqueness and
strangeness, far outweighs that of any historical generalisations that I might be able to
extrapolate. The profound absorption of his father’s idiom in W. F. Bach’s fugue in C
minor (pp.256-64); the quirky eclecticism of Samuel Wesley’s ‘Salomon’ fugue
(pp.186-93); the vast ambition of Mozart’s ‘Great’ Mass in C minor K.427/417a
(pp.256-64); the sublime indifference to his audience shown by Beethoven’s Grosse
Fuge (pp.386-8)—these things are the real heart of this study, often at their most
interesting when they diverge furthest from the mainstream.
The history of fugue at this time does not lend itself very well to a broad-brush
historical approach. Its evolution was infinitesimal compared to the vast innovations
that transformed other genres during the same period. Albrechtsberger in 1800 was
writing fugues in much the same way Monn had in 1740. Charles Wesley’s fugal style
was largely dependent upon Handel’s. The fugues of Johann Ernst Rembt (1749-
1810) and Michael Gotthardt Fischer (1773-1829) are virtually indistinguishable in
style from those of the first generation of Bach’s pupils. The history of fugue, then,
during this period, is almost no story at all. It is possible, however, to summarise both
1 ‘Texts and lumps’, New Literary History, 17/1 (Autumn 1985), 1.
392