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

even have had an informal agreement with John Ashley, the manager at Covent
Garden. 59 Unfortunately 1800 was the year in which Haydn’s Creation swept all
before it, and no performance of the Confitebor eventuated. ‘The Confitebor shall be
ready, & I am sorry to say that Voices and instruments appropriate, cannot be ready
also’ he remarked at the time. 60 The first performance had to wait more than twenty
years, until May 1826. But if in 1800 it had been trumped by Haydn’s Creation, in
1826 it was overshadowed by Weber’s Oberon. 61 The concert was reported briefly in
that month’s Harmonicon, but made no further impression, and the work disappeared
again from sight. Efforts by Samuel and (after his death) by his daughter Eliza to have
it published came to nothing. His son, Samuel Sebastian, managed to bring about a
partial performance in 1868, and Nicholas Temperley refers to another in 1892. 62 But
it was not until 1972 that Samuel Wesley’s Confitebor received its second
performance. If the obscurity of his Missa de Spiritu Sancto is the consequence of a
uniquely personal set of circumstances, in the case of his Confitebor Samuel Wesley’s
experience is prophetically all too typical of the ambitious but thwarted composer of
today, writing major works that receive only the most occasional performance.
Like the Missa, the Confitebor has its roots in the Neapolitan concerted church
music of the middle of century (Temperley provides a list of composers he would
probably have been familiar with through the embassy chapels who could have
supplied models), 63 though perhaps more of the influence of Handel and Haydn can be
seen here. The quantity of fugue is significantly less than in the mass. While the
59 Ibid. p.59.
60 Letter to Christian Ignatius Latrobe, 2 Feb 1800, in M. Kassler and P. Olleson, ‘New Samuel
Wesleyana’, Musical Times 144/1883 (Summer 2003), 49.
61 Ibid., p.188-9.
62 Review of John Marsh’s edition, Notes, Second Series 31/1 (September 1980), 129. A fascinating
review of the 1868 performance by Henry C. Lunn can be found in The Musical Times and Singing
Class Circular 13/308 (October 1, 1868), 535. He found the choral sections ‘excellent examples of
a school founded upon the grandest models’, but was less impressed with the solo movements,
hearing the air ‘Fidelia omina mandata ejus’ for example as ‘a mere florid display for a soprano
voice, without a particle of religious feeling throughout’.
63 Temperley, Confitebor review, 129-30.
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