Is Bach a Great Composer?

[lukeottevanger]

The passage that Sforzando quotes is from Villa Medicis....

It wasn't sfz quoting it, it was me, just FWIW.

He gives the bridge passage that leads back into the main theme. This is designed to bring the music down from the giddy heights of the previous section - con moto - poco stretto - and then on the page itself: sempre accelerando - in other words it is very fast...

Evidently. And no problem with that. But the 'virtuoso' passagework here is so rudimentary and routine - the simplest arpeggiations of (mostly) the dominant seventh, through its various inversions, and serving no function other than the obvious harmonic one. When Beethoven - or even Liszt - does anything similar, there is almost always some motivic coherence, or some harmonic intricacy....

The block chords you complain about are there to provide the grandeur that the subject requires. These methods are often employed in classical music, even by Beethoven, whom I'm sure we agree was a much greater composer. I cannot believe that an amateur at that time would be bold enough to write music like this. This is not one of my favorite pieces. It has a certain Lisztian feel to it.

I can see what you mean about the block chords being there for grandeur - it's just that 1) they seem to be only a half-hearted attempt at it (again, see Beethoven or Liszt or Chopin for examples of the piano exploited more imaginatively for this effect) and 2) they seemed to predominate in most of the music of Fanny's which I looked at, to its detriment.

The piece that follows, ' La Serenata', is much more subtle; one could almost call it sophisticated and it has a very catchy melody that goes down well in my experience. The last piece in this Lienau publication is quite individual with a dynamic figuration that I have found nowhere else in the repertoire - playing it correctly at speed is a tour de force.

La Serenata does look rather better, I agree - but again, the left hand is just clunky, in octaves almost throughout, and the right hand's reference to the guitar topic is equally heavy-handed and simplistic, to my eyes (again, block triads alternating with their inversions - look at Liszt's continual reinvention of the piano when writing pieces dealing in such standard musical topicality in comparison). I chose the Villa Medicis piece because it seemed to me to fall somewhere in the middle of the pieces I had looked at - La Serenata looks a little better, as I say, and there are two or three other pieces that look quite good, though still below the level of Felix's Lieder ohne Worte in pianisitic imagination and internal detail, I think. But there were also pieces that struck me as even worse. For instance, an unpublished Sonata full of rodomontade and hyperbolic tremoli unjustified by the melodic/motivic/contrapuntal/harmonic/formal and registral content (perhaps she never finished it - it has the look of a sketch)

I would be less impressed if she had imitated either the St Matthew Passion, which she knew inside out, or the Beethoven sonatas, which she played from memory. Great works stand. they cannot be recreated. One has to move on.

Quite true - but Liszt, and Chopin, and Alkan, and Schumann, and Brahms, and Felix Mendelssohn too, in a lesser but wholly realised way - they all managed to 'move on' from Beethoven, to find new and utterly individual ways of using the piano, with continual imagination, invention and daring which I feel is lacking in the pieces I have seen of Fanny's (and that is only to talk about use of the instrument, before one even considers all other areas of composition). But again I am careful to emphasize - I don't know her music at all, outside these pieces, and I am more than happy to think that there may be other works (her Lieder, for instance) in which she excels.

Just because we revere the great - such as Bach and Beethoven - that does not mean we should ignore the achievements of other composers. I find your comments condescending and without any real substance. You do not like this music because you have decided not to, although I appreciate that Josquin has not come to terms with the Romantic ethos.

Not sure who you are addressing this to, but I couldn't agree more, with the first sentence at any rate. I'm the first to explore lesser-known composers with abandon and excitement (why was I looking at Fanny's music in the first place? Because I am an inveterate hunter of music I don't know - yesterday's sightreading included pieces by Wyschnegradsky, Britten, Crumb, Berio - and Fanny Mendelssohn; today's included pieces by Sculthorpe, Scelsi, Tan Dun, McCabe, Protopopov, Killmayer, Feinberg.....). I'm only to happy to find the virtues in these composers, to the extent that I am aware that a negative comment from me is perhaps rarer than it ought to be. In its own way, the awareness of my usual generosity towards composers is one reason why my reactions to Fanny's music - which I was expecting to be better than it was - surprised me so much.

[Ten thumbs]

It wasn't sfz quoting it, it was me, just FWIW.

My apologies for the misidentification.
I wish I had the facilities for displaying scores.
Thank you for you reasoned criticism, even if I don't agree with it entirely.
No one is trying to rank Fanny alongside the composers you mention. I just like her open direct idiom, which is at least idiosyncratic with much chromatic harmony and undisguised dissonances.
If every composer could be compared to Bach, where would we be?
Like you, I like to explore, but viva the great masters!      

[jochanaan]

Not to take away from Bach--but:

It would be impossible to claim seriously that Fanny Mendelssohn-Henselt left as great a body of work as JSB or even her brother Felix.  I am only acquainted with a single work of hers, the Piano Trio Opus 11 (the same one that Josquin scorns)--yet that work is as bold, as technically assured, as moving and musical as anything her brother ever wrote.  Definitely a masterwork.  Luke, I suggest you don't dismiss Ms. Mendelssohn-Henselt until you've had a chance to examine it. It is a tragedy that she didn't write more such before her too-early death.

[lukeottevanger]

Not to take away from Bach--but:

It would be impossible to claim seriously that Fanny Mendelssohn-Henselt left as great a body of work as JSB or even her brother Felix.  I am only acquainted with a single work of hers, the Piano Trio Opus 11 (the same one that Josquin scorns)--yet that work is as bold, as technically assured, as moving and musical as anything her brother ever wrote.  Definitely a masterwork.  Luke, I suggest you don't dismiss Ms. Mendelssohn-Henselt until you've had a chance to examine it. It is a tragedy that she didn't write more such before her too-early death.

Well, as I made clear before, I was not dismissing Fanny's music in toto - as I said frequently, I was only talking about the impression made on me by the scores I examined, and was only too happy to believe that she wrote finer pieces. However, as it happens I do have a recording of the trio you mention, but it obviously hasn't made much of an impression on me, as I forgot about it! That's slightly unfair as, now I try to remember it, a vague impression of a powerful, fluent piece remains - but I'm afraid otherwise it has slipped my mind, which isn't a great sign! I will renew my acquaintance with it later, perhaps.

Ten Thumbs - I agree with every word of your last post