Program Notes by Martin Pearlman

"Every Sunday at 12 o'clock I go to Baron van Swieten -- and there we play nothing but Händl and Bach," wrote Mozart to his father (April 10, 1782).  "I am just building up a collection of Bach fugues. . ."  The Baron Gottfried van Swieten, an influential patron of the arts in Vienna, is best known today as the librettist of Haydn's oratorios, The Creation and The Seasons, and as the dedicatee of Beethoven's first symphony.  While an ambassador to the Prussian court in Berlin, van Swieten had collected works of Bach and Handel, and he became a champion of this "early music" on his return to Vienna.  Mozart and Haydn had, of course, known something of Bach and Handel before and had studied learned counterpoint, but at van Swieten's gatherings, they were exposed to living and breathing counterpoint that was great music.  Several years later, in the late 1780s, van Swieten commissioned Mozart to make arrangements of large vocal works of Handel, including Messiah.

As part of his study of Bach, Mozart arranged some of the keyboard fugues in the Well-Tempered Clavier for strings, perhaps for performance at one of van Swieten's gatherings.  (He did not transcribe the preludes that go with them.)  The occasional small discrepancies between Mozart's transcriptions and the keyboard originals may represent attempts at "improvements," but could well be an effort to adapt the music for string instruments.  Others may be due to inaccuracies in the manuscript originals that Mozart was using.

In any case, these experiences no doubt played a role in Mozart's increasing use of fugal writing in his own works, not only in choral music, but also in symphonies and other pieces.

Boston Baroque Performances

Arrangements of fugues from Bach's Well Tempered Clavier

March 2 & 3, 2012
NEC’s Jordan Hall, Boston, MA
Martin Pearlman, conductor

March 5, 1993
NEC’s Jordan Hall, Boston, MA
Martin Pearlman, conductor

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