Nagmusiek. By Stephanus Muller.

Abstract

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.