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Bach and Handel each in their own way were a great influence on later generations of composers. Both of them, in their own personal way, summed up the major styles of European music. Handel cultivated a concerto that was based the style of Correlli and Bach cultivated a concerto that was based on the style of Vivaldi. Handel perfected the Italian opera and the English Oratorio, while Bach perfected the cantata, the German Passion, and the Latin mass. Handel’s music relies more on melody and Bach’s relies more on counterpoint. This is not to say that Bach couldn’t compose good melodies or that Handel couldn’t write good counterpoint. It is plainly a standard observation. Also Bach relied more on phrasing while Handel relied more on dynamics. Although they were both rather adept at using contrasts of texture to formulate interest, this technique was more crucial in Handel’s music. Handel’s music, for the most part, is more vocally oriented, and Bach’s music is more instrumentally oriented. They both were masters of the great European styles of their time, but Handel was much more influenced by the Italian style than Bach, and Bach was more influenced by the German style. It must likewise be noted that Handel’s music is posing no difficulty to carry out than Bach’s. This is surely one reason that Bach’s music was not as ordinary in his lifetime as was that of Handel. Let’s talk about Bach’s influence first. The most widely circulated work of his in his own lifetime was the Well Tempered Clavier, a big work, in two volumes, each volume containing a prelude and fugue in each major and minor key, totaling 48 pairs of preludes and fugues. This work is intended to be didactic as well as agreeably diverting to the keyboard player. It was Bach’s intention that the player of these terrifi pieces would not only find them agreeably diverting and joyful to play, but also would gain, from performing them, clear or deep perception into compositional techniques, specially counterpoint. Many keyboard teachers were still using the WTC a generation after Bach’s death, indeed, even Chopin’s piano teacher was using this book in the early nineteenth century. The Well Tempered Clavier of Johann Sebastian Bach is one the most seminal works of music ever produced. Generations of composers learned the art of counterpoint by playing and studying this great collection of preludes and fugues. Most of Bach’s music was ignored until the latter half of the nineteenth century when the Bach revival got underway. However sure works of Bach, most notably, The Well Tempered Clavier, were kept alive by a little circle of intellectuals. A man by the name Baron Van Swieten was amongst these outstanding musical connoisseurs. He hired the twenty-six year-old composer, Wolfgang Mozart to direct his little orchestra for the duration of his on a weekly basis private concerts which were kept on Sunday afternoons. He loaned Mozart a copy of the WTC so that he could study and play it in his leisure time. He paid Mozart to arrange a heap of of the fugues of the WTC for string trio. Mozart was astonished by the talent of this work. It was a unfathomed crisis in Mozart’s life to discover such extraordinary contrapuntal music, the likes of which he had never known. Suddenly his counterpoint, which was always very good, became even better. His counterpoint kept getting more and more complex after his encounter with the WTC. At the age of thirty three Mozart heard one of the Bach motets and was transfixed by it is intricate complexity and great beauty. The choirmaster at Leipzig gave Mozart a copy of the score to all six of the Bach motets. He held these for the rest of his short life, (he had less than three years left to live) treasuring them like the precious jewels they are. They were a unfathomed influence on his late style. In the last two years of his life Mozart’s counterpoint became even more exquisite and complex than before. As for Beethoven, he was raised on Bach’s WTC. He could play through book one in it is entirety when he was only eight years old. Despite the fact that Beethoven knew the WTC and most other keyboard music of Bach thoroughly, he was not peculiarly adept at counterpoint, at least not in his early years. Being fascinated in the more homophonic style in vogue at the time, the expressiveness in his music relied more on thematic relationships, harmonic movement, and transformation of motifs. Also I would say that Beethoven relied more on rhythmic iteration and rhythmic transition than any other composer. Nonetheless, his early experience with Bach’s keyboard music, particularly the WTC, was worthful for him. In his later years, wanting to compose sure pieces in a more contrapuntal style, Beethoven worked hard at mastering counterpoint. He returned to the music of Bach and Handel, and even studied Palestrina. In his late music, he devised a style of counterpoint that is more remindful of Handel than Bach. His fugues in his late amount of time are very rhythmic in nature and rather distinguishable in the history of music. He was found of using fugue themes with repeated notes and rather angular outlines. In the last decade of his life Beethoven proved himself to be a competent contrapuntalist, even even though it may be said that his counterpoint is at times a bit awkward. The ungainliness of his counterpoint in truth gives it a sure power, a sense of struggle, distinguishable to his music, and at times even rather charming. It may be hard to valuate how much he gained from Bach and how much from Handel. He seems outwardly to have been more influenced by Handel but his psychological result of perception learning and reasoning of Bach’s keyboard music was surely worthful to him. It is hard to say how much of Bach’s vocal music Beethoven had seen. He wrote letters to publishers amid 1810 and 1824 requesting them to send him copies of the B-minor Mass but it is not known if he ever received any copy of it. Beethoven had access to the libraries of private accumulators such as the Archduke Rudolph, Baron Van Swieten, and others. In these private libraries he could have read a lot of vocal works by Bach, Handel, and other composers. As cited above, Chopin’s piano teacher had his students play the WTC. Chopin loved and valued this great tome his entire life. On that widely known and esteemed trip he took with George Sand, to Majorca, it was the only music he took with him. The influence of the WTC on Chopin was profound. Most persons don’t think of Chopin as a contrapuntist, and it is true that one does not find much in the way of imitative counterpoint in his music. He never composed any fugues, except as an academic exercise when he was still rather young, and there are not a great deal of canons by Chopin. However it can, and should, be said that Chopin’s counterpoint is exquisite. No other piano music in the entire nineteenth century has such smooth voice-leading. The inner voices in his music are closely as melodically interesting as the bass and treble voices, and the music has a transparency that allows one to listen each distinguished line clearly. Each voice in his piano music, flows mellifluously and smoothly, with never an awkward measure. The influence of the WTC on Chopin ought to not be underestimated. Of course it goes without saying that Brahms was influenced by Bach. More than any other composer, Brahms studied the music of former composers. He was surely very fond of Handel but he utterly loved Bach. Brahms was, perhaps, the biggest contrapuntist of the nineteenth century and to this he owed a sure debt to Bach. Schumann likewise loved Bach and paid homage to him in his Six pieces in Canonic form, opus 56. Schumann commended playing one prelude and fugue from the WTC per day. As for Mendelssohn, Bach’s influence on Mendelssohn may be most without apparent effort seen in his preludes and fugues, which are more or less remindful of a heap of of the preludes and fugues in the WTC. The music of J.S. Bach was held alive only by a little circle of intellectuals until the Bach revival that was kicked of by Felix Mendelssohn with his historic performance of The St Mathew Passion in March of 1829. Bach’s vocal and instrumental music was gradually getting more available in print since the last decade of the eighteenth century but Mendelssohn devised a more outstanding consciousness of the greatness of his music. Then in 1850,on the hundredth anniversary of Bach’s death, the Bach Society was formed in Germany. The Bach Society’s raison d’etre was to publish each extant work of J.S. Bach. This huge project was not finished until the very end of the nineteenth century. Handel’s influence on later generations was perchance more direct. His operas and oratorios are very appealing. He surely knew how to please a crowd, yet there is so much more than mere pandering to the masses in his music. His juxtapositions of strongly contrasting textures, his cautiously times use of dynamics, his finelooking melodies, and his capacity to eke out so much expressiveness from one motif, make his music a virtual compendium of compositional technique. Although Mozart knew only a little fraction of Bach’s music, he was exhaustively intimate with the music of Handel. During his childhood trip to England he became well acquainted with Handel’s music and he never lost his taste for it. To any individual intimate with Mozart’s liturgical music, it is evident that his psychological result of perception learning and reasoning of Handel was deep and thorough. You may listen Handel’s influence in some of Mozart’s early works, such as The Solemn Vespers, and in later works such as the C minor mass and the Requiem mass. In fact, the opening page of Mozart’s Requiem, finelooking as it is, is plainly a reworking of the opening choral motion of Handel’s funeral music for Queen Caroline. And the glorious double fugue in the Kyrie from the Requiem, uses as one of it is two themes, a more or less modified version of the theme that Handel used for “With his Stripes, We are Healed” from his “Messiah.” By far, the major influence of Handel on later generations was through his oratorios, the most famous of which is “Messiah.” Baron Von Swieten (mentioned above) commissioned Mozart to re-orchestrate this great work as well as Handel’s “Acis and Galatea,” “Alexander’s Feast,” and “Ode for St Cecilia’s Day.” “Messiah” is the most thinly scored of Handel’s oratorios, largely because he was writing it for the city of Dublin, and having never visited that city, did not know what instruments would be available. Messiah is scored for the basic Baroque orchestra, which comprises of strings, oboes, and bassoons, with trumpets and kettledrums reserved for the more celebrative numbers. Not only did Mozart add a lot of instruments to the score but he modified a great deal of of the arias. Some of them he cut short, or modified sure passages. In a great deal of of the arias Mozart changed the harmonic structure. But in the choral movements, he made few changes other than adding instruments to double each voice in the choir. He did the same to “Acis and Galatea.” Also, “Acis and Galatea” Mozart added an instrumental countermelody to each aria. These marvelous works would have pulled through without the Mozart versions, notwithstanding they became even dandier masterworks when reworked by Mozart. The popularity of Handel’s “Messiah” is not to be underestimated. It was immensely frequent in his day and has remained so, influencing some composers, in particular Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn’s two oratorios are plainly influenced principally by Handel. As noted above there may be found a sure Handelain influence in Beethoven’s music. Many of Beethoven’s grand themes sound as if they could have been written by Handel. A good example is the main theme to the Consecration of the House overture. More than once in his life Beethoven indicated his opinion that Handel was the biggest composer who ever lived. It will have to be mentioned, however, that Beethoven knew very little of Bach’s music outside of the keyboard works. In general, the nineteenth century, composers were influenced by the grandeur and power of Handel and the exquisite, complex counterpoint of Bach. The most originative of these composers were competent to incorporate into their own distinguishable style what they learned from these masters. Bach and Handel were both unbelievable in their own right, and they were likewise seeds that bore great fruit in future generations. The influence of these composers must not be underestimated. Bach’s WTC alone was a immense influence, as was Handel’s Messiah. It seems to me that Handel’s influence is more direct and obvious, a lot of examples are Mendelssohn’s “Elijah” and much of Mozart’s church music. Unfortunately, numerous of Bach’s outstanding choral masterworks were not heard or published for over 150 years. What would Mozart have thought of Bach’s B minor mass, or St Mathew Passion? How would the Christmas Oratorio or the Magnificat have influenced Mozart if he had known these fantasti pieces? We will never know. The influence of Bach is more subtle than the influence of Handel and may be seen for the most part in the way other composers learned counterpoint by studying his works. If you want to learn how to construct a bass line that goes well with the melody, supports the harmony, yet has beauty, and an independence and logic of it is own, there is no better composer to study than Bach. If you want to compose contrapuntal music with complexity, yet with smoothness, clarity, and transparency, then studying the music of Bach and Handel is indispensable.
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful. 9 of 9 people found the following review helpful. friendly for my students. This collection contains shorter works, in their original form, with accurate detail and editorial suggestions as to interpretation. I would recommend this book to everyone wanting a first time introduction to Chopin’s most famous works! 5 of 5 people found the following review helpful. Well, 18 whole pieces out of nineteen is almost perfect. |
A good introduction.
Excellent introduction to Chopin’s piano music