From the Spring 2005 MT
In memoriam
Eric Sams
I got to know the late Eric Sams through attempts to ‘teach’ his son Jeremy at Cambridge some 20 or so years ago [writes Robin Holloway]. I’d always enjoyed Sams père’s books on Lieder – The songs of Hugo Wolf (Methuen, 1961; rev. Faber, 1983), The songs of Robert Schumann (Methuen, 1969; rev. Faber, 1993), both better by far in their later, fuller editions; then their much delayed companion, preceded by a BBC Music Guide (1972), in The songs of Johannes Brahms (Yale University Press, 2000) but, alas, never the hoped-for Schubert; and I had been a tremendous fan of the unique combination of ingenuity and empathy by which he unveiled, in a number of MT articles from the 1960s and 1970s, the secret impulses of Schumann’s ciphers (and other games), showed in detail how they worked and how they translated into living music. It was in the MT, too, that, in addition to numerous book, music and record reviews, he published his solution to the hidden ‘Enigma’ theme, demonstrating how each of Elgar’s 14 variations was related harmonically to ‘Auld Lang Syne’.
As a friend he was warm yet wary, withholding yet generous. One sensed the anger and frustration of a first-rate mind that had never quite made it with the musicological establishment. These were compounded, with interest, where his Shakespeare studies were concerned. I duly received copies of the book on ‘The Real Shakespeare’ and the editions of Edward III and Edmund Ironside, together with animadversions on what he perceived to be a conspiracy of silence from a united academic bastion. Here I don’t know enough to adjudicate. About the songbooks I am absolutely sure. Belles-lettristiques, even dilettante, by standards of present-day rigor (mortis): but the volatile poetic and musical sensitivity, the ability to gather and codify, the brilliant yet unobtrusive intelligence charged with imagination, the ardent heart, are indispensable and irreplaceable.
Eric Sams, musicologist and Shakespeare scholar: born 3 May 1926; died 13 September 2004.
|
