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

pieces are known from a single copy, often at several removes from an autograph.
Furthermore, since organists have had an incentive to explore the darkest recesses of
Bach’s output (requiring as they do different music each week), even very doubtful
works have not had a chance to gather dust in academic libraries, but have been
circulated and recirculated in numerous practical editions. I shall look at two further
pieces which, until relatively recently, were accepted as being unquestionably genuine.
BWV 534, the Prelude and Fugue in F minor, has had a long and complex
critical history since it entered the canon in 1844 (printed by Peters from a copy in the
hand of Johann Andreas Dröbs, a second generation pupil of Bach). Assuming for the
moment its authenticity, it is thought to date from the early Weimar years. 15 Along
with BWV 545 and 546 it represents an important shift in his style—the preludes are
more continuous and less rhapsodic than formerly; the fugues move away from the
virtuoso 17th-century Spielfuge type towards a slower, alla breve manner. BWV 534
is generally held to represent an early stage in this development: early, because the
prelude is of modest dimensions and unaffected by the Vivaldian ritornello patterns so
important after 1713-14, and because the fugue has a number of peculiarities—as we
shall see.
If complacent adulation while its position was secure had been followed by
critical disparagement once its authorship had been called into question, we would
have had a journalistically satisfying tale of musicological hypocrisy. Its actual critical
history is much more complex and interesting. Philipp Spitta set the tone in 1873 with
an equivocal critique, finding ‘very great beauties’ but certain deficiencies also:
It has, so far as was possible with Bach, a somewhat irregular growth; many new figures of
counterpoint are brought in, but in a short time seem to lose their vitality, so that the theme is
constantly feeling about for new support; in spite, therefore, of very great beauties, something is
15 As with nearly all Bach’s free organ works, stylistic features are the only means of dating.
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