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

sublime.
Perhaps the most uninhibited, delightfully naïve expression of this attitude can
be found in a letter William Crotch wrote to his grandson in 1835: ‘I determined to
write something which would show what I was fond of & I gave a few first bars of
Allegri’s Mass performed by voices alone at the Pope’s Chapel on Good Friday while
all the lights are extinguished excepting one. These are as follow [a few modal chords
and a cadence with 4-3 suspension]. Play them very slow & soft & tell me how you
like them William? They make my blood run cold.’ 27 This visceral, emotional
response to the past was different to the approaches of previous generations. Most—
Tinctoris, Printz, Burney, and Quantz, for example—had taken an evolutionary view,
confident in the superiority of the present, and regarding the past as being of purely
antiquarian interest—if that. Others (Pepusch, Hawkins, Gluck, Kirnberger) looked
backed to a variously defined but static golden age (antiquity, the Renaissance, or the
high Baroque), from which the present was an irreversible declension. For the
Romantics, however, (and for their descendants today) the past took on a numinous
aspect, not from any particularly ‘golden’ qualities of its own, but simply by virtue of
its distance from the present.
We have already identified a very early example of this poetry of archaism in
Clementi’s Sonata in D op.40/3 (pp.363-5 above—yet another example of Clementi’s
ability to anticipate musical trends decades before they became current), and another in
the fugue from Wesley’s Confitebor (p.155-8). But Felix Mendelssohn was the first to
systematically exploit the emotional resources of nineteenth-century Romantic
historicism. Whilst his fugal technique (developed under the stern eye of Zelter) was
impeccable, he had not the slightest hesitation in riding roughshod over any notion of
contrapuntal integrity if it served his expressive purpose. The Fugue in E minor
27 N. Temperley, The music of the English parish church, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1979), vol. I, p.249.
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