Late Style and the Idea of the Summative Work in Bach and Beethoven University of Massachusetts Amherst, 24 April 2021

Abstract

In April 2015 the University of Massachusetts Amherst launched its first festival and symposium celebrating the music and legacy of Johann Sebastian Bach. Since that time, the event has become a biennial tradition. However, the 2021 festival and symposium were unlike any of the prior events because of their virtual format. In addition, solo and chamber pieces replaced the large choral works featured in previous festivals. Pre-recorded performances, released each evening in the week prior to the symposium, also included several world premieres of compositions written in homage to Bach. The day-long symposium featured five paper sessions, each exploring a different aspect of the concept of late style in relation to Bach or Beethoven. The first of these focused on keyboard music in a panel featuring Christine Blanken (Bach-Archiv Leipzig), Reuben Phillips (University of Oxford) and moderator Ellen Exner (New England Conservatory). In her paper, entitled ‘Steps towards New Concepts and against Pragmatism in Organ Music: The Late Organ Music by Johann Sebastian Bach – Models, Pathways, and What Posterity Made of It’, Blanken provided an overview of Bach’s activities as a writer for organ. In the process, she revealed a gradual evolution from church composer to virtuoso to learned composer. She claimed that Bach became more oriented toward summative collections late in life, calling his Clavierübung III (1739) a ‘musical catechism’. If Blanken focused on Bach’s organ music, Phillips concentrated on the reception of Bach’s late works by Donald Francis Tovey in his paper ‘Completing Bach: The Mass in B Minor and the Art of Fugue in Tovey’s Hands’. While scholars typically consult Tovey’s published writings and recordings to study his engagement with the composer’s music, Phillips chose instead to look at handwritten annotations in Tovey’s personal copy of the Bach-Gesellschaft Edition; these include his pencilled completion of the Art of Fugue and his continuo realization for the Mass in B minor. During his analysis of the annotations, Phillips revealed Tovey’s engagement with the composer to be a very personal one that resists the commonly monumentalized vision of late Bach. The second session focused on two major sets of variations for keyboard, Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, with papers by me (Erinn Knyt, University of Massachusetts Amherst) and Michael Spitzer (University of Liverpool). The moderator was Daniel R. Melamed (Indiana University). In my talk, ‘J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations Reimagined’, I documented seven recent multi-composer works (1997–2020) based on Bach’s piece. Focusing on case studies of two pieces, The New Goldberg Variations (1997) and 13 Ways of Looking at Goldberg (2004), I showed how the plurality of Bach’s late style helped generate new pluralistic postmodern compositions. In doing so, I expanded notions of Bach’s late output as being not just summative, but also generative. There is a tendency to think of Bach and his work as completing an age, as summing it up. However, my talk, along with Robert Marshall’s keynote address (mentioned below), also sought to show ways that Bach helped generate or inspire the creative activities of later generations. If my presentation focused on recent reception history, Spitzer compared subjective and affective aspects of late style in both sets of variations in his talk, entitled