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

‘AN ENGLISH MOZART’
This was the musical environment into which Samuel Wesley was born in
1766, less than a decade after Handel’s death. ‘I knew him, unfortunately, too well’,
recalled the wife of his friend Vincent Novello: ‘pious Catholic, raving atheist, mad,
reasonable, drunk, sober—the dread of all wives and regular families, a warm friend, a
bitter foe, a satirical talker, a flatterer at times of those he cynically traduced at others
—a blasphemer at times, a puleing Methodist at others.’ 22 He was eccentric in his
faith, eccentric in his family life, eccentric in the course of his career, and—most
importantly for us—eccentric in his passionate advocacy for the music of an obscure
central German composer by the name of Johann Sebastian Bach.
The success John his uncle and Charles his father had preaching to the poor
and dispossessed, and the attraction that Methodism soon came to have for the lower
classes, should not unduly colour our picture of the Wesley family itself. Samuel
Wesley was no Stephen Duck or John Clare, emerging from a poor, uncultured
background. Like his brother John, Charles Wesley was a modestly cultured middle-
class gentleman: ‘It is a mistake to think of the Wesley family as being of humble
origin’ says Kenneth Hart. ‘Although they addressed much of their Gospel preaching
to the poor of England they were not speaking to their own class. They may not have
had much money (Church of England priests, for the most part, still do not), but by
birth they were “an aristocratic and self-confident stock. Their connections were
wholly with the landed gentry and the Anglican clergy, and their sympathies remained
to the end with the Established Church.”’ 23
One should equally not assume that Samuel’s initial musical experience was
22 Mary Sabilla Novello, letter to Henry Phillips c.1841, BL Add. MS 31764, quoted in P. Olleson,
‘The obituary of Samuel Wesley’, Nineteenth-century British music studies ed. J. Sampson and B.
Zon (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), p.129, and many other places.
23 He is quoting Armstrong, ‘Wesleys’, 96. See also P. Olleson, Samuel Wesley: the man and his
music (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2003), pp.1-14.
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