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

have had a rich Treat in chewing the Cud of old Byrde’s Minims: they are full of my
own Errors & Heresies according to his Holiness Pope Horsley.’ 105 Although he
attempted to publish only some of Byrd’s choral works, might he also have come
across some of his keyboard music, and there found a kindred spirit? Perhaps, but
when this rondo was written, in 1814 or 1815, the only influence could have been
Bach’s Clavier-Übung III. 106
We have already observed how wide-ranging Wesley’s awareness of the music
of J. S. Bach was. It is worth emphasising how unusual this interest in the choral
preludes was. RCM. MS 4021 contains (among other things) a series of figured bass
harmonisations of the Clavier-Übung chorales by Wesley himself, which can be taken
as an indication of the very serious attempt he made to understand the inner workings
of Bach’s preludes. Percy Scholes has pointed out how in 1889, Walter Parratt ended
his article on the Voluntary for the Grove Dictionary of Music by saying: ‘Some day
we may hope to hear the best of all—John Sebastian Bach’s wonderful settings of all
the Chorales.’ In the 1910 edition this was amended to: ‘It is even possible
occasionally to hear John Sebastian Bach’s wonderful settings of the Chorales.’
Scholes continues: ‘In the edition of 1928 no mention of the chorale prelude appears in
this connexion, the need for propaganda-suggestion being apparently considered no
longer to exist.’ 107 This shows just how far ahead of his time Samuel Wesley’s interest
in the Bach chorale preludes was.
It is difficult to know how commercially successful these pieces were. ‘The
Christmas Carol’ is perhaps a little unrepresentative in the ostentation of its
105 Letter to Vincent Novello, 14 September 1825, Olleson, Letters p.394. ‘Pope Horsley’ is William
Horsley (1774-1858), composer and ‘Fifth and Eight Catcher in ordinary and extraordinary to the
Society of Musicians’ (Wesley’s description in BL, Add. MS 3123), who had recently criticised
Wesley’s Service in F for harmonic irregularities.
106 It is true that, as a child, he had been faced with passages from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book as a
test of his sight-reading ability. He was critical of its departures from the eighteenth-century rules of
musical composition: ‘when such excellent rules are broken, the composer should take care that
these licenses produce a good effect; whereas these passages have a very bad one’ (Olleson, Wesley,
p.16).
107 P. Scholes, Oxford companion to music, 10 th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p.182.
184