Scholars working in the field of the reception of
Bach's works.
RESEARCH CONTRIBUTION
Reception of Bach's works (esp. Well-Tempered
Clavier) in England between 1750 and 1830.
ith substantial contributions by Yo Tomita, Philip Olleson and Michael
Kassler, who also edited the volume, The English Bach Awakening is
the first book of essays to treat the rise of interest in Bach and his music
in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England.
Such a volume has long been needed: aside from Samuel
Wesley’s well-known Bach Letters, little else from this area of Bach
reception history has generated much scholarly interest to date. Now, instead of
yet another piquant tale about men named Wesley, Horn, Jacob and Kollmann and
their fascination with Bach preludes and fugues, we have sustained inquiries
into the central artifacts and events of this phenomenon.
Contents
Illustrations
Preface
Abbreviations
Chronology of the English Bach Awakening
1.
The Dawn of
the English Bach Awakening Manifested in Sources of the ‘48’ (Yo Tomita)
2.
The English
Translations of Forkel’s Life of Bach (Michael Kassler)
3.
Kollmann’s
Proof of the Regularity of Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy (Michael Kassler)
4.
Samuel Wesley
and the English Bach Awakening (Philip Olleson)
5.
The Bachists
of 1810: Subscribers to the Wesley/Horn Edition of the ‘48’ (Michael
Kassler)
6.
Pursuit of
Perfection: Stages of Revision of the Wesley/Horn ‘48’ (Yo Tomita)
7
Samuel Wesley
as Analyst of Bach’s Fugues (Yo Tomita)
8
Portraits of
Bach in England before 1830 (Michael Kassler)
Appendix:
The Horn/Wesley Edition of Bach’s ‘Trio’ Sonatas (Michael Kassler)
Index of
Persons
Index of
Bach’s Compositions
how it looks
The first of Yo Tomita’s two source studies, “The Dawn of the English
Bach Awakening Manifested in Sources of the ‘48’,” is a model of its kind: a
meticulous, detailed discussion of every known source of the
Well-Tempered Clavier in England during the chronological boundaries
announced in the volume’s title.
The second, “Pursuit of Perfection: Stages of Revision of the Wesley/Horn
‘48’,” performs a similar service for the various stages of the best-known Bach
edition from this time and place: Wesley and C. F. Horn’s edition of the WTC,
first published in four installments between 1810 and 1813 and subsequently
revised and reissued in 1819. Michael Kassler’s multiple contributions include a
detailed chronology of the English Bach “awakening” (his more semantically
accurate term for the “revival” described by previous writers), a searching
detective story about the unknown translator of Forkel’s Life of Bach, a
lengthy explication of Kollmann’s general theory of tonality (as window into his
1806 analysis of Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy), a brief social history of the
subscribers to the Wesley/Horn edition of the WTC, an essay on the
provenance and history of the various Bach portraits and engravings in England
before 1830, and finally, a brief discussion of the Horn/Wesley edition of the
Bach trio sonatas. Philip Olleson supplies the central narrative, a step-by-step
account of Samuel Wesley’s Bach activities, which draws heavily on his intimate
knowledge of the Wesley letters and surviving memorabilia.
Any volume that addresses such a broad range of issues in reception history
necessitates difficult editorial choices about what to include. The WTC
clearly needed to be a major focus, given its central place within
turn-of-the-century English Bach reception, but the sheer length of Tomita’s
source studies (which comprise more than a third of the volume), plus the
recounting of its publication history by both Kassler (in the chronology) and at
greater length by Olleson gives rather short shrift to the trio sonatas, the
first edition of which is relegated to an appendix. Surprisingly, none of the
authors seems very interested in the attempts by various English Bach
enthusiasts to promote the vocal works. The essay on Kollmann’s theory, which
his own contemporaries largely ignored, has perhaps the least to contribute to
our understanding of the English Bach Awakening, though it shows how
Kirnberger’s theories percolated quietly among the most fervent of Bach’s
followers even after the turn of the century. Kassler’s opening chronology
provides a useful context, though it injects quite a bit of overlap into the
whole.
One rather startling omission is the lack of an explanation for the 1830
terminus. The starting date of 1750 must have seemed obvious, given Bach’s
death in that year and the appearance during that decade of the first English
sources (and perhaps even performances) of his music. But one is left to wonder
whether the English were fully awakened to Bach’s music by 1830, or whether this
was simply a convenient place to call it quits, before Mendelssohn and
Moscheles’s respective Bach activities in England got started. Organization and
presentation are, on the whole, first-rate, and throughout one learns just as
much from the generous footnotes as from the main text.
