TRANSCRIPTION
...concerns [____]
good - [_______].
I am glad to
hear so good an
account of your brother,
& if he has conciliated
[____ of _____] he as
done a very good
& [______] miraculous
deed.
Yours truly,
Charles Wood
[___________]
NOTES:
1) Unfortunately, this leaf was fully laid down on
an album page and permanently,
affixed, probably to preserve the signature. This is last of letter containing
at least 3 pages.
The addressee is unknown. The best clues to his identity are the reference to
his "brother" in line 5 and the "conciliation" of "______ of ______" in line 7.
The last line may be a place and date but Wood's penmanship is illusive.
ABOUT THE
COMPOSER
Charles Wood, born in Armagh, Ireland, June 15, 1866. He
attended the Royal College of Music in London. He later attended Cambridge and
earned a Mus. Doc. in 1894. He became Professor of Music at Cambridge in 1924.
He was an organist as was his older brother William (1859-1895). Charles died
Cambridge on July 12, 1926.
A book was written about Wood by Ian Copley: The Music of
Charles Wood--a Critical Study (Thames Publishing, London, 1978) 215pp. In a
review of this book (Music and Letters, Vol. 60, No. 3, July 1979,
pp.351-354), reviewer Arthur Hutchings offers the following comments that are
enlightening from a biographical point of view:
"If Charles Wood had not been a versatile and admirable
composer, his stature as an artist would not have merited a short article."
Hutchings compares, perhaps contrasts is more accurate, Wood with S.S. Wesley:
"Had [S.S. Wesley] been born in 1866 instead of 1810, German-trained teachers
might have served his needs as they did Wood's . . . .A stepmother and an
increasingly insane father could not bestow upon young Wesley what Wood enjoyed
in a large, happy father which encouraged his study of classical sonatas,
quartets, symphonies, concertos and operas. Of fourteen children the eight boys
were Armagh choristers, father being a lay clerk and mother a former diocesan
secretary. The eldest boy, William, was seven years Charles' senior, went to the
Royal Academy of Music and later taught there. His usefulness to Charles may be
imagined . . . all Wood's church music that is now familiar dates from after his
preoccupation with secular work and the best of it was written after the war in
which he lost a beloved son. It was therefore composed during the eight years
before his death in 1926."
Hutchings continues: "As was expected from young composers of
promise in the last decades of the 19th century, Wood made his mark at the Royal
College first with cantatas that secured the powerful friendship of Sir George
Grove." Concerning Brahms, "...it is unlikely that Brahms was studied more
intelligently than by Wood: yet Wood's quartets, unostentatiously original, gave
fewer reminders of Brahms than do [Charles] Stanford's."
Hutchings quotes a tribute to Wood as a teacher by his
pupil Herbert Howells: "Even when a man has had the luck to have studied with
Stanford, Parratt, Davies, and less officially with Parry, Holst and Vaughn
Williams, he can still find it possible to rate Charles Wood as the most
completely equipped teacher inn his experience . . . gentle alike to the
bunglers and the brilliant. He did not male extortionate demands. Because he
asked little, some of us made it a principle never to go empty-handed to his
lessons."
"No English musician since [William] Byrd has composed Holy
Week music as deeply moving as Wood's St. Mark Passion," says Hutchings.
". . . purely as a composer Wood must be classed as petit maître. . ."
REV. 02/21/2006
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