1827 – Meeting Samuel Wesley

In the summer of 1827, back in England, Sir George took me to Norwich to take part in the fashionable Norfolk and Norwich Triennial Festival. He had been engaged to lead and conduct a performance of G F Handel’s oratorio ‘Jeptha’ in the St Peter Mancroft Church.

After the final rehearsal, we went to visit poor old Samuel Wesley, who was at ‘Bethel Mental Hospital’ in Norwich city, following a nervous ‘breakdown’.  I remembered that I had come across this well-known musical figure, son of the Methodist hymn-writer Charles Wesley, back in 1815, at the Philharmonic Society concert in London. The Wesley family had very loose connections to Lady Priscilla through her uncle Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, the victor at Waterloo.

(Samuel Wesley)

When Sir George and I entered the Hospital, we were greeted by Wesley with: ‘Ha! Here comes that mountebank, the noble knight-man!’; his voice betraying a clear and devastating disdain for aristocrats like Sir George!

It was not long before Samuel Wesley’s eyes fell on me. He became very excited. To my amazement he played the complex and fiendishly difficult ‘Chaconne’ for unaccompanied violin by Johann Sebastian Bach. This was the first time these extraordinary tones had run through me. And this was when J S Bach was almost unheard of; it was a few years later when Felix Mendelssohn brought Bach to the attention of the British music-loving public.  Even so, I knew that Wesley was devoted to this remarkable German Lutheran composer, and he played the Chaconne like a ‘man possessed’.

Beethoven vs Bach

How can I describe my feelings when I am confronted with Bach’s music?  Everything about it is so different from those Romantic ‘stirrings’ which I feel when Beethoven’s sounds (and much of the music inspired by him and produced after him) are resonating through my body and coursing through my strings.  Hardly any of my players over the years have felt wholly relaxed with Bach, nor have they seemed capable of expressing any of that ‘Schleiermacher stimmung’ which I find so significant and spiritually meaningful, and which I know is inside me, waiting to be released.

Except Samuel Wesley!  –  on that remarkable day in Norwich’s Bethel Hospital.  The mathematical precision and fugal complexity of Bach were no longer rigid or regimented, neither were they slavishly adhered to – as seemed to be the understanding of so many other performers. But in this super-human musical execution by this remarkable musician there was so much conflicting complexity which was almost tearing me apart!  At the time I didn’t realise it, but now I think I can grasp something which must have been lying behind this astonishing rendition of Bach’s ‘Chaconne’.

(A new book about Bach’s Chaconne)

Complexity and counterpoint

Samuel Wesley was a man of great complexity.  He was born into a high-profile Methodist family with a father who was a Church of England clergyman and one of the world’s most prolific hymn-writers. His uncle John Wesley was one of the most ardent preachers and propagators of 18th-century evangelical Christianity.  Although his family encouraged his considerable musical talents, they disapproved strongly of his becoming a professional musician, mainly because theatres and concert halls were, to them, dangerously worldly and immoral places.  Samuel’s personal life caused great conflict in the family. He eventually deserted his Methodist upbringing and became a Roman Catholic!

And here he was, pouring out his Catholic soul to me in this highly ‘tortured’ Chaconne for solo violin, a work of huge complexity written by a German Lutheran composer whose every note had been etched out solely and devotedly ‘to the glory of God’. It interests me that, during my lifetime, many commentators and analysts have found references and hints in the ‘Chaconne’ to the crucifixion of Jesus, and that perception certainly resonated within me and throughout my body with Samuel Wesley’s touch.

Opposing dimensions

It’s only recently that I have come to realise the momentous importance of this feeling, which almost matches the significance for the Western world of the effects of ‘historical criticism’ emanating from Germany, mentioned last time.  Samuel Wesley was, as it were, pregnant in his body with powerful opposing dimensions waiting to come forth – Wesleyan revivalism, Deism, Darwinism. It was a time of various evangelical awakenings including Calvinism, Unitarianism, Swedenborgianism & Quakerism, Primitive Methodism, Wesleyan Reformers, Freemasonry, and the re-evaluation of the Church of England through the Tractarian Movement and Roman Catholicism.  If he was ahead of his time as the promoter of the ‘English Bach Movement’, as he surely was, he must also have been ahead of his time when it came to religious identity and spiritual ‘belonging’!   No wonder he was troubled by mental illness most of his life!

But, certainly, the sounds emanating from me that Summer’s day in that Norwich Hospital were highly complex, contorted and gloriously confused; my unique voice had crucifixion in its tone, its accents, strains and in its ‘stimmung’.  I will never forget it,

Neither will I forget what followed…………………………………..