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

practice is less concerned with the composition of fugues than their reception; but
awareness of these anthologies could have influenced the way composers approached
fugal writing. A contrast between the eternal verities of fugal construction and the
ephemeral mannerisms of galant fashion may have underpinned many composers’
attitude to counterpoint. To write a fugue was, in a sense, the musical equivalent of
sculpting in marble—not just for an age, but for all time.
Musically effective as the results generally are, this insistence upon the pure
sublime did tend to result in a certain uniformity of style. More interesting from an
analytical point of view are the many different attempts that were made to synthesise
fugal and sonata principles. I have (with a few exceptions) resisted the temptation to
make this a history of the growing influence of contrapuntal and imitative writing upon
sonata textures—a history which would have had to take in most of the development
of musical texture during this period. The mutual interpenetration of Baroque and
Classical styles has been, all the same, a constant preoccupation of this survey.
STRATEGIES OF FORMAL INTEGRATION
In the introduction we discussed the fundamental incompatibility in tonality,
texture, form, and phrase structure between fugal and sonata processes. Any attempt
to combine them is therefore something of a tour de force. In one sense there are as
many solutions as there are movements. Looking at the pieces we have discussed,
however, it is possible to categorise a number of different ways in which fugal
technique was made to accommodate Classical idioms.
First, and simplest, it could refuse to accommodate at all. There is very little
about W. F. Bach’s Fugue in C minor F.32 (pp.78-80), Krebs’s Fugue in D minor
(pp.100-1), Mozart’s keyboard fugues, those of Clementi’s opp.5-6 (pp.321-31), or
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