Nagmusiek by Stephanus Muller (review)

In 1956 Boosey & Hawkes published a miniature score of Arnold van Wyk's First String Quartet. On the back cover (a survey of 'Hawkes Pocket Scores: Modern Editions') van Wyk rubs shoulders with prominent composers of the period such as Bartók, Britten, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Vaughan Williams. This was not just a flash in the pan. Boosey & Hawkes had already published van Wyk's Five Elegies for String Quartet and would go on to publish his song cycle Van liefde en verlatenheid (a hit at the ISCM festival in Israel in 1954). In the 1940s and 1950s van Wyk was the most internationally recognized South African composer. Henry Wood conducted his First Symphony at the Proms, Barbirolli later conducted it at Cheltenham. That he had prominent and influential British friends is clear from the inventory on p. 353 listing letters from E. M. Forster, Bliss, Tippett, Vaughan Williams, John Ogdon, John Amis, and many others. Van Wyk had come to England in 1938 on a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music and stayed throughout the war, a particularly productive time for him, despite his employment as a broadcaster and editor of the BBC's Afrikaans service. His mistake, perhaps, was to return to South Africa. A lecturing post at Cape Town University resolved his financial worries but gave him less time to compose. At the best of times a slow worker, he was consumed with doubt about his worth. Production slowed almost to a standstill. By his death in 1983 at the age of 67 he had completed a mere twenty-seven works and Boosey & Hawkes had long since lost interest in him. Stephanus Muller's Nagmusiek (the title of van Wyk's piano masterpiece, a facsimile of its autograph included in a pouch on an inside cover) is the first book about the composer, based on the extensive van Wyk archive now assembled at Stellenbosch University, where Muller is the founder and head of the Documentation Centre for Music.

Nagmusiek is a handsome production consisting of three volumes in a slipcase. What is labelled as Volume 1 is paginated 611–832 and provides an exemplary and detailed worklist, including historic programme notes and reviews. Volume 2 (pp. 521–610) contains two indexes (general, van Wyk works) and 806 endnotes. Volume 3 (pp. 1–521 [sic]) appears at first sight to be a biography, in ninety-seven chapters, some no more than a short paragraph. These chapters are interrupted by three chronological sections: year-by-year accounts of events (Chronology I, pp. 164–211), works (Chronology II, pp. 293–350), and people (Chronology III, pp. 460–99). These useful compilations are drawn from Van Wyk's diaries and letters to close friends, all carefully referenced. Surprisingly, Chronology I does not end in 1983 with van Wyk's death, but continues for another twenty years during which the subject is no longer van Wyk but one 'Werner Ansbach', who together with his forebears has already made several fleeting appearances earlier in this Chronology. Mapping the information on Ansbach presented here against what one can find about the author Stephanus Muller, one soon concludes that Ansbach is Muller's alter ego. A biographer, however self-effacing, is inevitably part of any biographical project—through his or her predilections, life experiences, research expertise, and resourcefulness. Here, however, the biographer is unashamedly foregrounded. There is even more of Ansbach in the ninety-seven chapters. Thus 'Tinktinkielaan' (pp. 59–65) describes Ansbach's visit to the composer Hubert du Plessis, a friend and rival of van Wyk. We learn how the meeting was set up; about Ansbach's first impressions of Du Plessis, his house, and its contents; Ansbach's research paraphernalia (dictaphone, 'large sheets of cream paper', fountain pen); his reactions to Du Plessis's recollections and comments on van Wyk—in short, ethnographic 'thick description' on the assumption that every detail has relevance. The next chapter ('Miss Hopkins, I presume') prints Du Plessis's reaction to van Wyk's Nagmusiek, sent to...