J. S. BACH Jonathan Berkahn - Victoria University - Victoria ...

CHAPTER 2
J. S. BACH IN LONDON: CONVERTING THE
HANDELIANS
‘No references to Bach or to his music are known to have been made in England
during his lifetime’ says Michael Kassler in a preliminary note to The English Bach
awakening. 1 It was more than a century after his death before his name was at all
widely known in England, and another fifty years before his music began to achieve
the general popularity it has today. This growth was the work of many scholars,
performers, and publishers: Muzio Clementi, A. F. C. Kollmann, Vincent Novello,
Felix Mendelssohn, Otto Goldschmidt, James Higgs, and Ebenezer Prout, to name
only a few. The best known, however, was a ‘most interesting character and a
musician of something like genius’, 2 Samuel Wesley (1766-1837), the apostle of J. S.
Bach to the Handelians. Although the main body of this chapter is an exploration of
Wesley’s music and his attempts to bring J. S. Bach to the attention of English
musicians, we shall begin by looking at the immense influence George Frideric Handel
exercised over English musical life throughout the eighteenth century. There are two
reasons for doing this; first, in order to understand the musical environment into which
Samuel Wesley was born (and which he would spend most of his life battling); second,
because the widespread influence of Handel’s achievement makes an interesting
comparison to the—initially much narrower—sphere of Bachian influence we
discussed in the previous chapter.
1 Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004, p.xvii. According to Kassler the first known reference dates from 1754.
2 T. Armstrong, ‘The Wesleys, evangelists and musicians’, in Organ and choral aspects and
prospects (London: Hinrichsen, 1958), 100.
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