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

INTRODUCTION
‘Every hearer enjoys a clear, melodious thought,—the more seizable the whole to him,
the more will he be seized by it;—the composer knows this himself,—he sees by what
he makes an effect, and what obtains applause;—in fact it comes much easier to him,
for he has only to let himself go; but no! he is plagued by the German devil, and must
shew the people his learning too!’
R. Wagner, ‘Die deutsche Oper’ (1834) 1
This is a study of the fortunes and vicissitudes of a Baroque style during the Classical
period—an exploration of what happened to fugal writing between the death of Johann
Sebastian Bach in 1750 and that of Beethoven in 1827. By the time Richard Wagner
wrote the words that head this chapter (and which have supplied the title to this thesis)
fugue as a style had been obsolete for nearly a century. It was a hundred years since
Leonardo Vinci and his Neapolitan contemporaries had first achieved renown across
Europe by ‘simplifying and polishing melody, ... disentangling it from fugue,
complication, and laboured contrivance,’ 2 and in that time Haydn, Mozart, and
Beethoven (and many others) had shown the vast possibilities of this new way of
writing music.
For this reason it would seem that to begin such a study in the middle of the
eighteenth century is, in a sense, to begin it at the point when it ceased to be important.
The later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had seen the creation of a vast and
still unparalleled corpus of fugal works: in the music of Bach and Handel, of course,
1 Richard Wagner’s prose works, tr. W. A. Ellis, 8 vols. (New York: Broude, 1966), vol. VIII, p.57.
2 C. Burney, A general history of music from the earliest ages to the present period (London, 1776-
1789), vol. IV, p.547.
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