Johann Sebastian Bach - booksnow.scholarsportal.info

THE " ITALIAN " CONCERTO. I5Ito be a perfect model of its kjad ;very few, or indeed hardlyany, concertos could' be mentioned having such sglgjididqualities^ and sound \\;prking-out. " It was no less a masterof music than Herr Bach, who has made the clavier hisespecial study, and with whom we can safely venture tocompete with any foreign nation, who was to bequeath to usa piece in this form, which should provoke the envy andemulation of all our own great composers, and be vainlyimitated by foreigners." ^^^ The^^Qund-woxking-out. consistsof clearly grouped and shargjy contrasted subjects, whichscarcely need the_ajd..of different effects of tone to, makethem intelligible. Stnijji_foriii which is developed on theprirTciple of subjects of different kinds relieving one anotheriri succession, invplyes a predominance of the homophonicstyle, and an extension by means of episodes rather than athematic treatment in. many.parts. In this way the concertostyle resembles that of the modern pianoforte sonata, andBach's Italian concerto was undoubtedly the classical pre-_decessor of this later form, and may even be regarded as inmany respects its prototype. The modern sonata not onlytookirom the concerto the division into three parts, but it foundthere the Adagio and the last movement fully developed.The first jnovement is however quite different in the twoforms. Thj sonata movement bein^ the result^^f a combinationof the dance-form with that of the aria in threesections, it could derive nothirig from the concerto butthe episodic development, and even this had reachedits fuIT'gröwth in, the aria. The "last step towards theattamment of the modern sonata form was not destinedto be made by Sebastian Bach, although he was wellacquainted with that combined form in two sections, andemployed it himself in isolated cases ;^^^ for this step leddownward at first from freedom to narrow and petty limitations; and the master can have felt little impulse in this2«i Critischer Musikus, p. 637 f. Not the great, but the little, Germancomposers strove to emulate Bach, for example, Michael Scheuenstuhl, Stadt-Organist in Hof, who in 173S published a G minor concerto for clavier alone(Balthasar Schmidt, of Nuremberg).»C2See Vol. II., p. 60.