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

prelude/fugue pair. Perhaps rather surprisingly, the strongest centre of fugal chamber
music was not ‘Bach country’—north and central Germany—but the imperial court at
Vienna. In Chapter 3 we described how composers such as Wagenseil, Monn,
Gassmann, and Albrechtsberger, maintained the contrapuntal tradition of Caldara and
Fux; and how the fugues of Haydn’s opp.20 and 50 were not isolated ‘sports’ but
emerged from a rich context of similar works. In fact the chiesa tradition could be said
to have survived as late as the three- and four-part fugues for string ensemble that
Beethoven wrote under Albrechtsberger’s instruction. 11
COMPOSITIONAL INSTRUCTION
The teaching of composition was of course one of the most durable functions
that counterpoint was to serve, and to an extent this is one it still retains. It would
seem that the living, evolving music of one’s own day is a somewhat unstable medium
for compositional instruction. Although certain eighteenth-century texts—Riepel
(1752-68), Daube (1771-73, 1797-98), Koch (1782-93), Kollmann (1799)—showed
considerable insight into the workings of the new style and are thus of great interest to
us, their treatises had only a limited influence in their own day. Compositional
pedagogy remained centred upon instruction in strict counterpoint, founded upon
either thoroughbass (C. P. E. Bach, Marpurg, Kirnberger) or species counterpoint
(Fux, Albrechtsberger, Cherubini). We have seen the determination with which Haydn
(pp.199-202) and Beethoven (pp.321-31, 388-90) pursued their contrapuntal
education, and wondered at the apparent absence of Mozart’s (p.330).
As the late Baroque style passed further and further into history, the practice of
instructing composers in one manner so that they might write in another 12 became
11 The Viennese court’s taste for fugue continued into the nineteenth century; the quote on p.200 about
how Francis II (1768-1835) loved fugues ‘properly worked out, but not too long’ dates from 1823.
12 A comparison might be drawn with the way in which traditional English public schooling
approached English grammar by way of Latin and Greek.
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