Sir Henry Wood: Champion of J. S. Bach by Hannah French

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Reviewed by: Sir Henry Wood: Champion of J. S. Bach by Hannah French David C. H. Wright Hannah French. Sir Henry Wood: Champion of J. S. Bach (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2019). 353 pp. L. P. Hartley’s aphorism “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” the famous opening to his novel The Go-Between, made an apposite appearance as the title of David Lowenthal’s two books (The Past Is a Foreign Country and The Past Is a Foreign Country—Revisited), in which he investigated ways that cultural history has been constructed and symbolized.1 Hannah French’s fascinating discussion of Sir Henry Wood’s championship of J. S. Bach recalls a relatively recent past phase of British musical culture in which things were indeed done very differently. My purpose here in linking the different scholarly concerns of Lowenthal and French is for the interesting parallel between how earlier historians treated and wrote about the past, and the ways that musicians of earlier generations performed music of the past. As Lowenthal describes the historical aspect in The Past Is a Foreign Country, “up to the nineteenth century those who gave any thought to the past supposed it much like the present.”2 We see its musical counterpart evidenced in nineteenth-century editions of earlier repertoires issued by celebrated performers. The freedom with which they would treat or adapt the musical text was very much part of their attempt to capture in print how they actually played it. These printed editions preserve the adjustments nineteenth-century performers felt it appropriate to make for the benefit of their audiences, in effect, a process of transposing the musical past seamlessly into their own present. Some of what French demonstrates about such musical practices in Wood’s case may seem astonishing to readers unaware of the gulf between British musical culture in late Victorian and Edwardian times, and that of today. Obviously, the new technologies of recording and broadcasting transformed the ways that music was disseminated. But, no less completely, the profound changes generated by the ideas—and ideals—of the historical performance movement in the second half of the twentieth century made Wood’s [End Page 104] musical treatment of Bach’s scores seem more an act of willful vandalism than a serious attempt to make the composer’s music comprehensible to generations of Prom-going audiences. The radical and culturally disruptive sounds of historically aware performance, transmitted through broadcasts and recordings, quickly revolutionized how we came to experience and understand historical repertoires. Consequently, the sound world of Wood’s well-intentioned but overblown Bach was, almost overnight, fossilized into the condition of a historical aberration, more cause for musical embarrassment than a heritage worth reclaiming. Ironically, this attitude was nowhere more clearly evident than in the famous Promenade Concert series that Wood had made so much his own. William Glock (who directed the Proms from 1959 to 1973) was as iconoclastic in his programming of historical repertoires as he was of modernist ones. Thus, Prom audiences were reintroduced to a galaxy of well-known baroque composers, as well as being initiated to the music of unfamiliar medieval and Renaissance ones, all in their new, “authentic” guises. People either loved the sounds they heard, or they enjoyed complaining vociferously about them. But the overriding consequence of the authentic performance concept was that historical repertoires were now being presented with greater textual accuracy, and in ways that sought to recreate the performing styles revealed by contemporary treatises. Preserving the pastness of earlier repertoires by dressing them in their historical sound worlds was an act that invested the resulting difference with aesthetic significance. So, the reaction against Wood’s nineteenth-century endeavors to make “his” Bach contemporary for his modern-day audiences set in immediately after his death. As the century continued, Wood was mythologized only as the creator and sustainer of the Proms, and most certainly not for his performances of Bach’s music, which seemed stranger and more at odds with post-War musical culture as time moved on. In the first part of her book (Contextualising), French looks at the English Bach Revival, which gathered pace from the...