Notes for: July 14, 2009
In the spring of 1782, Mozart, then a young composer-musician in Vienna, met Baron Gottfried van Swieten, a wealthy aristocrat who was superintendent of the Imperial Library of Music and who sponsored regular Sunday concerts in his home. Von Swieten had served as Austrian Ambassador to Prussia, and while in Berlin he had developed an affection for Bach’s music, then little heard in Vienna. He was also devoted to Handel’s oratorios, and was the person who suggested to Haydn that he compose his great oratorios, The Creation and The Seasons.
Mozart became a regular and eager participant in van Swieten’s Sunday concerts. “I go to Baron von Suiten’s (sic) every Sunday at midday, where nothing is played but Handel and Bach,” Mozart wrote his father. “I am now collecting the fugues of Bach, not only of Sebastian but also of Emanuel and Friedemann [Bach’s sons]. I am also collecting Handel’s fugues.”
Previously Mozart had only limited exposure to Bach – fugues had gone out of fashion, and they had played little part in the musical education that he had received from his father. Now, encouraged by van Swieten and prodded by his fiancée, Constanze Weber, herself a keyboard player, Mozart set himself to mastering the art of fugal writing in the Bach mold. For self-instruction as well as for performance in van Swieten’s drawing room, he arranged a number of Bach fugues for string trio and string quartet and tried his hand at writing fugues of his own.
As things turned out, Mozart, while admiring Bach’s fugal writing, soon realized that fugues, with their elaborate structural rules and techniques, were inapplicable to his own style and time. In subsequent instrumental compositions, consequently, he used counterpoint only occasionally to enrich the texture. Fugue as a formal structure played a major role only in his Requiem and other traditional religious music.
Mozart’s K. 404a consists of six fugues arranged for string trio, each with an added adagio prelude. Five of the fugues were composed by Johann Sebastian Bach, and one by his oldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann. For years it was accepted that Mozart had made the arrangements and added the preludes, and they are so listed in the Köchel catalogue of Mozart’s works. Some scholars now question that attribution, while others continue to accept it, citing as supporting evidence the references in Mozart’s letters to the arrangements he made of Bach’s music for van Swieten’s salon.
This evening we hear the first pair, in D minor, which is based on a fugue in Book I of Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier.