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

instrumental music (Clementi and Abel, for example), nearly every composer of
significance wrote at least some vocal music for the church. This was simply not the
case with organ music—a matter of some chagrin for organists today. Both Mozart
and Beethoven achieved considerable renown on the instrument, yet wrote almost
nothing for it. ‘What’ we may well ask ‘did they play?’
The answer of course is that, for most, it was less trouble to improvise than put
pen to paper—the better the organist, unfortunately, the truer this was. Catholic
organists needed a endless supply of versets for the liturgy, Lutherans needed chorale
preludes, Anglicans voluntaries. Unlike choral music, it was possible for a competent
organist to supply all that was needed on the spur of the moment.
The Pasquini example quoted on p.271 shows how the business of fugal
improvisation was by no means a transcendental feat: ‘The fact that many people
thought Samuel Sebastian and his father geniuses at improvising fugues, becomes a
good deal less impressive when one examines the organ fugues they succeeded in
writing down. If such flatulence was possible in recollection and tranquillity, what
sort of fugue would be liable to emerge from an improvisation?’ 6 Samuel Wesley’s
manuscripts in the British Library are full of fragments: themes, fugal subjects, and
bits of contrapuntal working. Many no doubt are abandoned or incomplete; but others
were likely noted down as aides memoires for his renowned improvisation. It might
therefore be better to think of them as un-notated rather than abortive compositions.
In such music as they happened to write down, organists generally maintained
the genres which had emerged by the mid eighteenth century: preludes and fugues,
versetti, voluntaries, ‘trio sonatas’, and chorale preludes—very few Classical sonatas
6 E. Routley, The musical Wesleys (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1968), p.183.
395