Fand IncWessex Press

Among the manuscripts that Harriet Cohen bequeathed to the British Library in 1967 was the score of a four-movement keyboard sonata in Bax’s handwriting (Add. MS 54767). The separate title page has the heading, Sonata in B♭ major (Salzburg). To the left of the title on the first page Bax has written, “Date: (conjectured) circa 1788”, and to the right, “Author unknown”. Suspicions that this is no transcription of an anonymous 18th-century work are aroused by the appearance in the second movement of a passage that occurs in the slow movement of Bax’s Violin Concerto (1937–8), and confirmation was provided by Alan Richardson, an acquaintance of the composer, who met him on a bus some time in the early summer of 1937. Bax told him that he was working on an 18th-century pastiche, perhaps as a musical purgative after the drudgery of orchestrating his recently completed march, London Pageant, at the end of which he had written, “Fine (thank Heaven!)”. A sketch for the opening of the Violin Concerto’s slow movement appears on the last folio of the sonata, which ties in with 1937 as the year of composition. Bax never submitted the sonata for publication, and no public performance took place until 21 April 1983, when Jonathan Higgins played the slow movement during a lecture-recital at the British Music Information Centre.

—Graham Parlett

The Fand edition of the Salzburg Sonata has been recorded by pianist Natalia Williams-Wandoch on the CD Piano Music by Arnold Bax (USK 1236CD) from Usk Recordings.

The Riddle of Schoenberg

The foremost musical riddle of the last hundred years is here solved completely.
Why, at the turn of the twentieth century, did one man apparently arrest the musical thought of the world?
Why did he fool so many of the people for so much of the time?
Was he an outsider, the odd man out, ignored by passing musical history, extruding dictatorial ‘bulls’, heedlessly outraging others?
Was his mission just ‘all in the mind’—of a theorist living in fantasy?
Are musicians so easily hoaxed? And did not the ordinary sensitive listener know all along what was wrong?

The Riddle of Schoenberg takes the form of an open letter to an Arts Council Chairman. Readers may also be interested in Armstrong’s later essay, The Missing Music Mystery, which takes a similar form and is also available from Fand.