kagablog

Stephanus Muller
University of Stellenbosch

Twice in his life, Arnold van Wyk used the term ‘Accida’ to describe his melancholy disposition. In the unpublished manuscript of his Common Place Book, discovered a few years ago among his manuscripts by the current writer, he writes: ‘The illness that plagues me is ACCIDA.’ He continues by quoting a description of the condition as being a mixture of ‘deep melancholy and sloth’. A second occurrence of the term is found in one of his small pocket diaries, when he writes on 18 July 1971 – a particularly barren creative year: ‘Got up early, but ACCIDA so intense that I could do practically nothing.’

After his death in 1983, Van Wyk’s melancholia become one of the enduring myths of his artistic legacy. Its aspect of reality was provided by the composer’s own pronouncements on the subject during his lifetime and the list of work titles ritually recited by commentators as more empirical proof of Van Wyk’s art as one permeated by sadness. Its status as myth nearly a quarter of a century after his death also derives from the total embargo that has rested on his documents until 2002, when limited and controlled access to his literary estate was granted by his literary executors. As his music languished in the dust and chaos of various South African archives and gradually disappeared from South African stages – after the early fifties Van Wyk’s British and never huge European profile gradually disappeared altogether – the myth of Van Wyk’s melancholia flourished.

Because his life has been very sparsely documented, reasons for assuming this potentially significant connection between a life mostly unknown and music largely forgotten are hard to find in the existing literature. Most colleagues, friends, students and family members remember Van Wyk as essentially ‘lonely’, ‘unhappy’, ‘moody’, physically awkward, extremely self-critical. In short: the quintessential suffering Romantic artist. No doubt Van Wyk inherited parts of this temperament from his mother. The little we know of her paints a picture of a woman who preferred to dwell on life’s misfortunes. To be sure, his earliest letters and diaries indicate a pessimistic nature and one perhaps unusually obsessed with loneliness and death. But his biography, as it emerges from his documents now being ordered, does not make happy reading either. His was not a particularly happy childhood; his mother (the only champion in his family of his musical interests) died when he was only sixteen years old. By that time (in 1932) the family had fallen on hard times and had become tenants on their own farm. The little we know of Van Wyk’s father paints a picture of a dishonest man who continuously abused his wife and children. Later in his life, Van Wyk’s homosexuality would be the source of much guilt, enforced secrecy and unrequited infatuations. Unfulfilled desire is writ large in the diaries and letters. Working as a university lecturer throughout his career – first at the University of Cape Town and later the University of Stellenbosch – Van Wyk was also spectacularly unsuccessful in this capacity. South Africa’s foremost composer in 1978 when he retired from teaching, he nevertheless remained an ordinary lecturer and was never promoted. Added to all the above, life-long tooth-aches and gum-illnesses, fastidiously recorded in the diaries that span 53 of his 67 years, made his life, quite literally, very painful. Had he not been born a melancholic, he certainly had enough reasons to become one.

Van Wyk’s biography also suggests an early sense of musical alienation and struggle. Although he played the piano from an early age, he only learnt to read and write notation by the age of twelve. There is evidence that as a composer he felt hampered by this ‘late start’. Trapped by the Second World War, the eight years he spent in London from 1939-1946 (until 1944 as a Performing Right Scholar at the Royal Academy of Music) would be immeasurably important to his creative development. As his creativity dwindled towards the end of his life, it is easy to see the London years as an infusion of musical and cultural ideas, creativity and support, the effects of which wore off increasingly fast after the early 1960s as his ties to England grew weaker and Apartheid South Africa’s isolation increased. Nevertheless, while in London, he continued to pine for his South African home while being acutely aware of his identity as an Afrikaner and how this made him different. On the other hand, after his return to South Africa in 1946, he felt dislodged from the cultural milieu that he had grown accustomed to in London. He quarreled with family, he initially struggled to get a job, his music was generally not understood or appreciated. On more than one occasion, he considered returning to London permanently and was encouraged in this by friends like Howard Ferguson, Dame Myra Hess and Ursula Vaughn-Williams. It never happened. He remained a man out of place, whether in London or Stellenbosch. In his neo-Romantic idiom of composition in the broader context of twentieth-century modernism, he was also a man out of time.

I do not want to explore further Van Wyk’s melancholia, certainly not in a Freudian or more psychologically or psychoanalytically rigorous way. Rather, I should like to draw a single point from the above. Arnold van Wyk’s melancholic disposition, a complex intertwining of nature and nurture, and the composer’s awareness of this on different levels, provides a compelling if speculative biographical context for some of his musical choices. And while this life-work epistemology is admittedly a cliché; as always it is the specific musical, historical and biographical content thereof, and how these co-ordinates could be seen to relate to each other in dynamic and complicated ways, that makes it an enabling rather than sentimental or limiting point of departure. The specifics in this case then, are as follows: First, musically, a tortuous compositional process as evidenced by Van Wyk’s sketches, diaries and letters and a life-long inability to complete works, resulting in constant revision. Also musically important is his self-conscious stylistic anachronism as a neo-Romantic who wrote, as he once put it, ‘basically common chords and very little above traditional harmony’. Second, historically, Van Wyk’s acute estrangement from place as a musician whose centre of cultural gravity was always thousands of miles removed from his sense of home. Third, biographically, the relatively musically impoverished background of the little boy from Calvinia, his early experience of personal loss and his (to him) problematic sexual orientation in a Calvinist society. The tentative connection that I should like to posit is between the unique structure of the resulting ‘extreme melancholia’ as Van Wyk termed it, and his preference for and use of sonata rhetoric, of which the literal traces is found in sketches and diaries. What follows is not so much a thesis – which would require a far more detailed investigation than I carried out – as a more modest unveiling of a possibility.

How often did Van Wyk use sonata designs or procedures in his music? We find sonata design and procedure in both his symphonies. In the First Symphony in a minor (1943) Van Wyk condenses the traditional four sections of the classical symphony into a single movement. There are traces here of an exposition, a development and a return to initial material. Yet, in reviewing one of the first performances of the work for The Observer on 29 August 1943, William Glock wrote: ‘Van Wyk has not yet managed, in fact, to derive his details from the whole and to make them lead back to it.’ As did Sir John Barbirolli in a letter to Van Wyk, Glock recognized traces of Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony in Van Wyk’s First. Yet, unlike the Sibelius Seventh, Van Wyk’s a minor symphony includes no new material after the exposition, making Glock’s observation of an ambiguous return perhaps more interesting. If the ‘leading back to the beginning’ was unemphatic in the case of the First Symphony, the Second Symphony, first performed in 1952, if anything over-compensated. The first of two themes is subjected to strict fugal treatment after what could be called an exposition, resulting in the most emphatic return of an opening theme Van Wyk ever wrote. However, finality seems to have come with a cost: he never liked the work, once quoting with agreement the comment of an English conductor who conducted the work in Cape Town: ‘I can respect this work but I cannot love it.’

In fact, it seems that Van Wyk’s use of sonata design or procedures in general has a lot to do with finding ways of ending music; ways of return that are not as emphatic as the fugue of the Second Symphony in its guise as a recapitulation, but not as tentative as the contracted form of the First Symphony (which he later described as ‘too sentimental’). To an extent this is the desire for (his) music to become works. But sonata design, specifically, may also have aided Van Wyk in ending the drawn-out compositional processes underlying these works. After all, his dissatisfaction with and constant revision of even those of his works completed by him, could have increased the attractiveness of sonata rhetoric to him as a more stable, less subjective and therefore more productive register of thematic and tonal possibilities. The piano work Ricordanza (1973) provides one of many examples. On 1 September 1975, after the ‘completion’ of the piece in 1974, Van Wyk writes in his diary: ‘[I] progress 1 cm with the end of the Recap[itulation] of Ricordanza.’ It may be significant that he is rewriting the recapitulation here (which is also the end of the piece); as he had earlier tried to rewrite the last movement of the symphonic suite Primavera, and still earlier the Capriccio (also a movement in sonata form) of the piano work Pastorale e Capriccio. In these works the moment of ending the work becomes indistinguishable from ending the compositional process and it is in this desire for a double ‘closure’ of work and process, I suggest, that sonata procedures – even if problematical and subject to extensive revisions – could provide a sense of an ending.

But there may be another reason for Van Wyk’s attractedness to sonata rhetoric, as suggested by the use of sonata design in the already mentioned Ricordanza. This is a small-scale solo piano meditation on J.S. Bach’s D major Prelude (Book II) stretching over no more than five pages (at the most six minutes). In this case a reading incorporating sonata procedures or design would seem counter-intuitive if one heard or read the music only. Yet the composer’s sketches and diary entries clearly state his thinking along these lines. What is interesting here is the need for the composer in such a small piano work, reminiscent if anything in temperament to an early nineteenth-century character piece, to avail himself of the structural scaffolding of sonata design. There is a hint here, also in the biographical connection of the piece as remembrance of an illicit sexual encounter, of the form providing a trusted Gerüst or core structure for that which flowed freely and licentiously in Van Wyk’s music. The suggestion here is that the composer avails himself of sonata rhetoric not to achieve closure, but to ‘enclose’, or even to ‘closet.

An even better example is Van Wyk’s largest work for piano, Night Music (‘Nagmusiek’). This is a twenty-five minute work for solo piano that was completed in 1955 and first performed in 1956. A revised version was completed in June 1958, after what the composer described in a letter to a friend as ‘one of the bitterest struggles I can remember or imagine’. In 1978 Van Wyk would claim in a letter that ‘Perhaps the biggest work that I have written to date is Night Music for solo piano – in this work I came very close to saying what I set out to say.’ The work is dedicated to the memory of the Australian pianist Noel Mewton-Wood, an intimate friend of the composer during the war years in London; a friendship that only came to an end when Mewton-Wood committed suicide in 1953. As in the case of Ricordanza, the work is laden with the pathos of the love-death narrative, and as is the case with the piano work Tristia where Van Wyk sets the medieval Dutch poem of ‘Egidius’ to a wordless piano texture in the ‘Rondo desolato’, in Night Music he writes an ‘Epilogue’ which is a wordless setting of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem ‘Ernste Stunde’ (‘Wer jetzt weint in der Welt, ohne Grund weint in der Welt, weint über mich’). In all three these cases language and biographical details intermingle with and influence musical choices, aligning the music with narrative purposes of which sonata design (in the case of Ricordanza) and sonata procedures (in the case of Night Music) become the chosen vehicles. In Night Music Van Wyk composes the sixth and main section of this one-movement work in sonata form. In his programme notes he describes this Allegro Agitato e Tempestoso section as follows: ‘This, the main part of the work, is in well-developed sonata form’. And then, after describing how motives previously heard in the work make their reappearance in this section, he concludes:

This integration is very necessary – too much ‘atmosphere’, in the long run, becomes uninteresting. Therefore also the fact that this central part is much tighter in conception and execution.

It is tempting, and, I think, plausible, to read the employment of sonata procedures in Night Music as a sublimated compensation of the atmospheric music characterizing the preceding molto lento introduction and the following four nocturnes, as well as the plaintive Rilke setting of the Epilogue. In this sense, the ‘well-developed sonata form’ (to use Van Wyk’s own words) could be read as a ‘corrective’, a ‘necessary integration’, a ‘normative formalisation’ of the ambiguity of the music that surrounds it. The chronology of the Night Music sketches does not contradict this idea.
The first idea for the piece is found in a sketchbook containing sketches of various other compositions as well. It is not dated, but the composer wrote a note on the cover of the sketchbook in 1968, stating that it contained the first sketches for Night Music.

Figure 1: Opening theme of introduction to Night Music

The first dated sketch of 23 July 1945, shown in Figure 2, expands on the same material. It contains the identical opening theme, here marked as a passacaglia theme.

Figure 2: Sketch of introduction to Night Music, 23 July 1945

Both these sketches are of the beginning of the slow a minor introduction that precedes the eventual four Nocturnes of Night Music. The first dated traces of what would become the ‘main section’ of the work, the ‘well-developed sonata form’, only appear in fair copy in 1956, the year in which the first version of the work was completed. It is also this section with which Van Wyk was dissatisfied and that was extensively revised in 1957 and 1958. From a chronological point of view, we therefore have a trajectory that starts at the introduction and ends in the central sonata form of the sixth section.
Formally, it is clear that Van Wyk did not have this central section in mind when he started out. To be sure, sonata terminology does crop up in connection with the Nocturnes, but only, it seems, in the sense of suggesting a generic three-part formal structure. For instance, a sketch of 26 December 1954 (see Figure 3), made at Howard Ferguson’s London home 106 Wildwood Road, contains material marked ‘after expo[sition]’, even though a sonata structure never resulted from this.

Figure 3: Sketch of Night Music, 26 December 1954

A formal plan for Night Music – the apellation Van Wyk attached to his ‘Nocturnes’ as early as 1948 – that is dated 15 September 1954 gives no indication of a planned sonata form (see Figure 4). The scheme sets out a four-movement work – the four nocturnes preceding the later central sonata movement – and an Epilogue. The order of appearance of the themes is worked out in order for the last Nocturne to function as a recapitulation of the first.

Figure 4: Sketch of Night Music, 15 September 1954

Another very faint structural outline occurs at the bottom of an abortive sketch of the development section of the sixth movement sonata form, possibly from 1957 (see Figure 5).

Figure 5: Sketch of Night Music with structural outline, c. 1957

Here we see how the slow introductory movement becomes a three-part structure preceding the four nocturnes. The relative weight of the central sonata structure is apparent, as is the implication that the closing material consists of three independent strands. Also significant is the small slur that Van Wyk inserted above the fourth nocturne in the direction of the central sonata form.
A more expanded version of this sketch exists in a set of rather cryptic undated lecture notes that Van Wyk prepared in Afrikaans on various of his pieces (see Figure 6). We see here that he now describes the improvisatory A minor introduction of Night Music, which contains all the thematic DNA of the work, as a ‘text’. We see also the formal plan of the four nocturnes – based, in Van Wyk’s words, on motives of the ‘text’ – move tonally from C minor/major to A flat major to the tonally indeterminate canonical third Nocturne (actually a Scherzo) to the E flat major of the last nocturne: Lento non troppo, teneramente. Also apparent is the connection between the fourth nocturne and the main section.

Figure 6: Arnold van Wyk lecture notes on the structure of Night Music

Eight bars before the end of this nocturne, Van Wyk introduces a soft E natural pedal point in a 4/2 chord that resolves to the A minor – ambiguously coloured with a C sharp – in the first theme of the climactic sonata form ‘sixth section’. Clearly, if we look at Van Wyk’s structural plan, he saw the last Nocturne as distinct from the sonata form, but clearly preparatory in function. Once the transition to the main section has been made, we are not only back in A minor/major, but the thematic material, placed in the top voice of the accented chords, is that of the first theme – or ‘motive’ as Van Wyk would have it. In effect then, we have a double return here where the exposition of the sonata form also becomes the recapitulation of the introductory material.

To conclude: we find here a structural reinforcement of material previously stated and developed in a structurally more flexible way. And the entire sonata form, rather than only the recapitulation, is employed to closure this ‘text’, to bound, to limit, to secure material that – twelve years previously – started out as an improvisatory Nocturne. It seems, therefore, that the ‘well-developed sonata form’ – even though it was to become the central part of the work – was a late creative intervention to rescue the work from its ‘atmospheric’ surroundings. The meanings of ‘closure’ or ‘enclosement’ that underlie my reading of Van Wyk’s employment of sonata design and procedures are of course metaphorical. That is: the effects of closure and enclosement enabled by sonata rhetoric with regard to musical material are implied to function not as conscious compositional intention but as metaphor for the neo-Romantic composer’s claim to a universality equal to the claims of modernism, or for the colonial composer’s desire to belong to an unambiguous sense of musical tradition, or for the gay composer to protect his vulnerability in a homophobic society. Nevertheless, as a reading of the motivation underlying structural choices connected to Van Wyk’s peculiar form of melancholy, it may also suggest a meaning-generative way of approaching the principles of construction in his music generally. And if it is no more than a metaphor, it is also no less: a search for a better understanding of the thing in itself by invoking an appropriate context.