Egon Wellesz - a man of influence

One day I shall write an article about the men in my life. I shall tell of my father, who oversaw my maths homework and always encouraged me to believe in myself. Then there was Owen Oliver, headmaster of my elementary school, who organised a 'fast track' for the few of us who were ready to respond to such prompting. Captain C Lisle Watson was like a godfather to me. He always sent us christmas presents and, at a crucial moment, made it possible for me to move on to Mercers' School ahead of time. Douglas Hopkins at the Royal Academy of Music taught me much of the trade which later became my profession. Equally importantly, he persuaded my parents that I must go to Oxford to study for a degree in music. And it was there I came under the gentle guidance of that great scholar and composer Egon Wellesz.

He was a University Reader in Byzantine Music, one of the two leading authorities in this specialised area of research. At the end of one summer's vacation he confided that this expertise was a kind of relaxation for him. Much more creative intensity went into the business of musical composition. He had just used the interval between two terms of teaching to put the finishing touches to some large instrumental works.

Wellesz had a wonderful background. As a student in Wien, a city central to european culture, he had stood at the back of the stalls to listen to Mahler conducting operatic masterpieces, including some still wet from the pens of composers whose names and stature are now so widely recognised. Guido Adler, a musical scholar of superlative distinction, was one of his mentors. He was a pupil and a friend of Arnold Schoenberg, that great explorer of new sonorities and codifier of unique compositional resources.

When Wellesz was invited to Oxford in the threatening days of the 1930s, he brought all this artistic and intellectual achievement with him, along with a substantial personal library of musical scores and scholarly tomes.

  My studies with him were a turning point in my life.

The Oxford tutorial system is of inestimable benefit to the keen undergraduate. I would arrive at Wellesz's house in Walton Street a few minutes before the appointed hour and make my way to his first floor study which extended all the way from the front to the back of the building. There was always a genial smile of welcome. Then, as was the general custom at tutorials, I sat down and read aloud the essay I had written during the previous week. Sometimes Wellesz would interrupt. There might be discussion of a point I had raised. And at the end there would be a summing up before he announced the subject of the essay I was to prepare for the following week. This was the pattern we followed.

I well remember presenting my first essay to him. He had suggested I write about the emergence of the symphony as a form of orchestral composition. I did as I had previously done at school, turned to my textbooks, read what their authors had to say, then put pen to paper to express their observations in my own words. My reading of this exposition had reached no further than the second sentence when I heard his very firm voice declare: 'I am sorry, but that is quite wrong.' I was more than a trifle mystified. How could these venerable books of mine receive such condemnation? I was soon to find out. These books were not based on original research. Far from it. Most of them were written by men who had looked at books written by men who had looked at books written by men who had read the research papers of those who had studied the original documents. This was lesson one. And a very valuable lesson it was. Beginning on that day, I no longer went to textbooks for the answers to questions of musical history. First I went to facsimiles or scholarly editions of the musical compositions under review and began to formulate my own conclusions arising from systematic observation and description. Books - apart from those theoretical studies to be considered for themselves - books were put to one side. It was musical scores that received primary inspection. I was becoming a musicologist, one who engages in scholarly research into composers and their creations. In my life at Oxford and in the years which followed I sought out original sources and double checked my references. Secondary sources were consulted only when these processes were completed.

One unanticipated consequence of this was that I came to spend extended periods of time in the Manuscript Room of the British Museum where I diligently copied Dr John Bull's keyboard works from documents written during his own lifetime in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, or soon after, and assisted in the production of a scholarly complete edition which now graces the shelves of many a music faculty library.

More than twenty years later, Wellesz's precepts still guided me as I toured the monasteries and secular libraries of Europe in search of the earliest extant evidence of western music. The excitement of my discoveries resulted in the modification of my mind's model of music's evolution in the countries west of the Rhine and Danube frontiers of Trajan's imperial domain. I was rewarded with a new outlook to pass on to my students; an outlook diverging perceptibly from the histories which some still regarded as sacrosanct.

But it was not only in the ways of musicology that Wellesz's influence proved invaluable. From him I gained a new perspective on the art of fine teaching. This too resulted in my putting aside one model in the mind and replacing it with a far more incisive tool.

Both before and since my time with Wellesz I have observed teachers who conscientiously supply all their pupils' needs. Every note is fingered for the pianist. Every nuance of expression is pencilled in on the printed copy. Tempi are rigidly controlled by the teacher.  And so it is with other studies. Specific textbooks are nominated for study. Selected passages are highlighted for easy reference. Frequent handouts contain 'all the student needs to know' to pass the examination and gain the coveted piece of paper at the end of the course. Much of excellence is absorbed in this way, but it is the excellence of the present and of the past. Such students are not well prepared for a future imbued with rapid changes of techniques, technology, and currents of opinion. I came to feel that if one of these students needed to go on an important journey, the teacher would plan the route, buy the tickets, take the pupil by the hand and lead the way, all the way, to the prescribed destination.

Wellesz was different. His way was far more fundamental and much longer lasting. If one of his pupils was about to go on a journey, any journey, Egon Wellesz would provide a map and a compass, make sure the student knew how to use both of them, point the way to the destination, offer a few words of farewell and send the tyro on their way.

By such expeditions we grow and prosper.

So mote it be.

francis cameron, oxford, 2 april 2000

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