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

aware of:
‘It is worth noting, in this respect, the extremely limited influence of the music of Bach in
Beethoven’s works, in spite of the fact that his knowledge of Bach was considerable. ...the use he
made of this familiarity is very small, almost negligible in comparison to the continuous reference to
Bach in the music of Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Schumann. The classical style had already absorbed
all that it could of Bach as seen through the eyes of Mozart in the early 1780s, and as Beethoven
continued to work within these limits, his love of Bach remained always in the margin of his creative
activity.’ 17
This would not be true of the following generation.
AFTER THE GALANT
The structural incompatibility we have noted between fugue and sonata was
paralleled by a strong antipathy certain mid eighteenth-century critics had expressed
toward the barbarous ingenuity of their predecessors. The anti-clerical Frederick II
reacted violently to any chamber music in which he detected ‘the smell of the
church’. 18 Rousseau spoke of ‘counter-fugues, double fugues and other difficult
absurdities which the ear cannot bear nor reason justify, ...nothing but the remains of
barbarism and bad taste, which subsist, like the porches of our Gothic churches, only
to reflect disgrace on those who had the patience to construct them.’ 19 J. S. Bach’s
former pupil Johann Adolph Scheibe complained of how Bach took away ‘the natural
element in his pieces by giving them a turgid and confused style’, darkening their
17 C. Rosen, The Classical style, 2nd ed. (London: Faber, 1976), p.385.
18 Kirkendale, Fugue and fugato, p.4. One might compare the attitude of twentieth-century modernists
to ‘Victorianism’ or to nineteenth-century Romanticism in general.
19 ‘Lettre sur musique Français’, quoted in E. Taylor, ‘Rousseau’s Conception of Music’, Music &
Letters 24 (1941), 237.
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