Beyond Bach: Beethoven’s Studies of Bach’s Works

The influence of C. P. E. Bach’s keyboard music on Beethoven is widely accepted, sufficiently known and amply documented. Thanks to Christian Gottlob Neefe, a declared Bach aficionado, Beethoven was exposed from youth to the aural phantasmagoria of Hamburg’s most imaginative composer. But how early does this influence register in his music? As early as 1785, this paper suggests. A remarkable similarity between two themes from Beethoven’s Op. 2, No. 3 and Bach’s H. 163 piano sonatas traps them into the cocoon of causality. The first theme, however, is a transplant from the piano quartet WoO 36, No. 3, composed in Bonn in 1785. With the entire WoO 36 drawing profusely on Mozart’s violin sonatas, would it be unthinkable that young Ludwig’s inspiration tapped on C. P. E. Bach as well? Analytical comparison of the two themes fortifies this plausibility. It also exposes instructive differences in the way the two composers treat so similar an idea: Against Bach’s unwillingness to develop it Beethoven shows a remarkable confidence in situating it within long narratives. This leads to an unsettling thought: if the music of C. P. E. Bach served as a mine of ideas for Beethoven, do their respective oeuvres stand to each other like a dictionary to a novel?

New Federalist, 2001

The reconstruction [see the beginning of the article], by this author, is based on some of the known facts surrounding Mozart’s transcriptions of several three- and four-voice fugues from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. Mozart transcribed them during the period around 1782-83, when he attended Baron van Swieten’s Sunday-morning musical salon, and while a phase-change in his compositional method was occurring. This change was provoked by his encounters with Bach’s works, in combination with Joseph Haydn’s revolutionary new string quartets (Op. 33), written the year before. To continue the year 2000 commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the death of Bach (1685-1750), and to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the publication of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, this article concerning Mozart, and a projected future article on Robert and Clara Schumann, will present evidence of the degree to which these composers who lived after Bach, intensively studied and “re-composed” his works as pedagogical exercises, to deepen their knowledge of polyphony and counterpoint, and then directly made use of Bach’s compositional method in composing new works. This evidence will be presented through the words of these composers, and through several of their musical works, not widely known today.

Per Musi, 2016

The present article discusses pedagogical aspects aiming to contribute to teaching and learning Bach's Preludes of the Well-Tempered Clavier. Section one presents a review of the prelude as a musical genre and the different styles that influenced the Well-Tempered Clavier Preludes. Then, there is an analysis of selected preludes that will exemplify the variety of styles found in this work of Bach.

Notes, 2001

2019

Up until recently, many musicologists perceived music history through the lens of what is known as the “linear view.” This is the idea that one “musical period” seamlessly gave way to another, with brief transitionary periods to bridge the gaps. As a result, composers were expected to fall neatly into categories depending on their chronological placement. For this reason, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the eldest son of J. S. Bach, was (and still is) regarded as merely the bridge between the late Baroque style and that of the Viennese Classicists. In the past half-century, however, scholars have begun to study Emanuel Bach in his own right, giving an honest look at his works without imposing any preconceived notions on them. These scholars became captivated with the “pre-Romantic” aspects of his style, especially in the genre he advocated known as empfindsamer stil, or “sensitive style.” These new insights into Emanuel Bach and other composers who are “ahead of their time” have had a pr...

Essays in Honor of László Somfai: Studies in the …, 2005

Music theory online, 2023

Beethoven's lessons in Vienna with Haydn, Albrechtsberger, and Salieri are well known, but considerably less has been wri en about his earlier studies in Bonn. This article examines what Beethoven may have learned from two treatises that Gustav No ebohm (1873) connected to Beethoven's Bonn manuscripts: Johann Philipp Kirnberger's Die wahren Grundsä e zum Gebrauch der Harmonie (1773) and Georg Joseph Vogler's Gründe der Kuhrpfälzischen Tonschule in Beyspielen (1776, revised in 1778). I corroborate the evidence that links these treatises to Beethoven, analyze and categorize their contents, and suggest some parallels between materials in these treatises and Beethoven's Bonn works including his "Elector" piano sonatas (WoO 47; 1783) and his two unusual preludes for piano or organ (op. 39; 1789, published in 1803). From what we know of Beethoven's studies in Vienna, several pillars of standard eighteenthcentury musical education are missing: the study of solfeggio, thoroughbass, and harmony. This article makes the case that Beethoven encountered this training in Bonn. From Kirnberger's Grundsä e, he would have learned about the fundamental bass, harmonic function and progression, and the principles of prolongation. In Vogler's book, he would have encountered solfeggio exercises, common thoroughbass pa erns including the Rule of the Octave, invertible sequences, diminution pa erns, modulations schemes to every key, the fundamental bass, and more. Although these two treatises were not the only books Beethoven likely studied in Bonn, they offer probable windows into his formative lessons in music theory, improvisation, and composition.

2009

Johann Christian Bach (1735-82), eighteenth-century composer par excellence, was one of the most respected musicians of his time. Overshadowed by the achievements of the later Classical composers, and totally forgotten during the nineteenth century, 2 he reemerged as a composer of significant stature during the twentieth century. 3 Focusing on his contribution to music history and his close relationship with Mozart, this renewed interest resulted in numerous scholarly studies, culminating in Ernest Warburton's monumental 48-volume publication, The Collected Works of Johann Christian Bach. 4 Reflecting on these changing fortunes, we may ask ourselves what the factors were that led to a reassessment of Bach's contribution to the Classical style; what ways these factors were related to Mozart's high regard for Bach; and why modern Mozartiana has included a revival of Bach's music. Addressing these issues, this article opens with a biographical survey, illustrating the context of Bach's life and work. It then continues with a discussion of the Bach-Mozart connection, and concludes with brief comparative analyses of the first movements of Bach's Symphony Opus 6 No. 6 5 and Mozart's Symphony K. 183/173dB, both in the key of g minor.