Summer 2002

A music copyist? In a recent article, Ruby Reid Thompson dismisses the established view of the Tregian manuscripts (FVB, Eg.3665, Dr.4302, and Ch.Ch.510—14) as legend, questioning the assumptions that have come to surround our understanding of them. David J. Smith responds.

Men of letters: Thomas Weelkes is widely considered to be one of the greatest and most creative of the English madrigalists. Eric Lewin Altschuler and William Jansen consider the attributions of some of his texts.

In memoriam

Dorothy DeLay 1917–2002
Eileen Farrell 1920–2002
Leo Ornstein 1892/93–2002
Yevgeny Svetlanov 1928–2002

We also mourn the passing of the French baryton-Martin Jacques Jansen (1913—2002), internationally recognised as perhaps the finest Pelléas of all time, and a noted exponent of operetta; the New Zealand-born baritone Bryan Drake (1915—2001), best known for his roles in Britten’s three Church Parables, and for thirty years Director of Opera at the Royal College of Music; the Australian baritone John Cameron (1918—2002), whose twenty-five-year performance career encompassed many UK premieres, including Dallapiccola’s The prisoner and Humphrey Searle’s Diary of a madman, and notable recordings, such as Vaughan Williams’s A sea symphony under Boult, Mendelssohn’s Elijah and Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius under Sargent, and a benchmark account of Butterworth’s A Shropshire lad, recently reissued on the Dutton label; the contralto Monica Sinclair (1925—2002), whose career included roles in the first performances of Vaughan Williams’s A pilgrim’s progress, Britten’s Gloriana, Walton’s Troilus and Cressida and Tippett’s The midsummer marriage; the Swedish tenor, Gösta Winbergh (1943—2002), whose voice married elegance and power and was ideally suited to the major Mozart and the lighter Wagner roles; the American violinist Guila Bustabo (1916—2002), dedicatee of Wolf-Ferrari’s Violin Concerto; and the controversial German opera producer Herbert Wernicke (1946—2002), whose recent Covent Garden Tristan divided the critics.

Books reviewed this issue

Under the lens

Christopher Fox examines Michael Finnissy’s The history of photography in sound

Like most people, composers become wary of birthdays as they get older. Will people remember? Will the celebrations live up to expectations? Significant birthdays, on multiples of five and ten, are even more fraught. Like bank statements, they provide a robustly frank account of current value: successful composers are feted, featured, serialised and analysed; less successful composers are left to carry on as usual. And the ‘big birthday’ experience can be unsettling. Being confronted by one’s collected endeavours can be as chastening as it is rewarding. As Benjamin Britten remarked in a Festschrift published on Michael Tippett’s sixtieth birthday, the birthday boy can feel that he is ‘already dead and that the musicologists are busy on the corpse’.

When Michael Finnissy was fifty, in 1996, the celebrations were justifiably generous. In Britain the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival revived his orchestral masterpiece, Red earth, alongside some of the chamber music, and I had a hand in producing a book of interviews and essays, Uncommon ground, which dealt with every aspect of his musical output. A fellow contributor to the book was Ian Pace who added a gargantuan present of his own, a cycle of six concerts at the Conway Hall in London in which he played everything that Finnissy had written for the piano. Some composers might have been crushed under such a weight of tributes but not Michael Finnissy, and his response was to produce new work with, if anything, renewed vigour, in spite of a serious heart condition.

The most considerable work to emerge from this period has been a cycle of eleven pieces for solo piano, each bearing a title which in some way links it to the cycle’s overall title, The history of photography in sound.

Other reviews

Jean-Christophe Keck’s new critical edition of Offenbach’s Orphée aux enfers, reviewed by Nigel Simeone

The new Grove dictionary of music and musicians, second edition, reviewed by Peter Phillips

In search of opera (Carolyn Abbate), reviewed by Arnold Whittall

The classics of music (Donald Francis Tovey) and Derrick Puffett on music (edited by Kathryn Bailey Puffett), reviewed by Andrew Thomson

Samuel Wesley: a source book (Michael Kassler & Philip Olleson), The letters of Samuel Wesley (Philip Olleson), and The careers of British musicians 1750—1850 (Deborah Rohr), reviewed by Fiona Palmer

The Josquin companion (edited by Richard Sherr), reviewed by Allan W. Atlas

Stravinsky’s late music (Joseph N. Straus), Stravinsky inside out (Charles M. Joseph) and Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring (Peter Hill), reviewed by Anthony Gritten

Serial music, serial aesthetics (MJ Grant), reviewed by Nicholas Jones

From classicism to modernism (Brian K. Etter), reviewed by Michael Fuller