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

periodicity and its fluctuating tonality, should find employment as a mode of
development is hardly surprising. An extreme case is the finale of Beethoven’s op.101
Sonata in A, where a fugue upon a subject derived from the opening theme serves as
the entire development (p.381). More typical are Clementi’s opp.40 and 50 sonatas
(pp.362-6), where imitative counterpoint is used in conjunction with a whole range of
developmental techniques to destabilise and reinterpret the movement’s thematic
material. The same can be true within rondo forms as well. In the finales to Haydn’s
Symphonies no.95 and 103 (pp.211-5), and even more in Wesley’s rondo ‘The
Christmas Carol’ (pp.362-6), fugal imitation supplies flexible connective tissue
between the recurrences of the rondo theme. On the other hand nothing can be taken
for granted with Haydn, and the finale to his symphony no.101 reverses this procedure,
substituting a sizeable fugal development for the final return of the rondo theme
(pp.212-3).
This sort of unpredictability should warn us that generalisations will take us
only so far. There was no ‘normal’ way of integrating fugue and sonata; in fact, the
opposite is true. Each attempt to combine two such disparate ways of writing created
its own problems and its own solutions, forcing composers to go beyond the
conventional limitations of genre. It is no accident that the composers whose approach
to form and texture was the most flexible and imaginative—Samuel Wesley, Haydn,
Mozart, Clementi, and Beethoven—were also those who had the strongest affinity with
the disciplines of strict counterpoint.
Our story ends with Beethoven. For all his immense influence upon the early
Romantics, the distinctions between them are at least as important as any affinities. If
he was the last to possess an instinct for the possibilities of the Classical style as a
natural mode of utterance, it was this instinct that limited his ability to absorb the
influence of the past—a presence that he and his contemporaries were increasingly
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