Author Description

If the series of miniatures for organ composed at intervals throughout his long life are Samuel Wesley’s personal pioneering equivalent of what was to become the 19th-century character-piece for piano, his more ambitious works contain some of the most important organ music of the period. Moreover, both in the disposition and form of their movements and in the use of apt but pianistically oriented figuration, they influenced directly the sonatas of Mendelssohn. The position, character, and function of the last movement of Wesley’s Voluntary 12th – differences of musical language apart – is perhaps the closest point of reference in the present volume, while their common debt to Bach is shown clearly in the decoratively melodic opening of Opus 6 No. 10 and the combination of power and ingenuity (embracing inversion, single and double augmentation, stretto, canon, and arsin et thesin) displayed in the D minor and C minor Fugues of 1815 and 1826... Voluntary in G minor, Op. 6, No. 9; Voluntary in F, Op. 6, No. 10; Voluntary in D minor; Voluntary and Fugue in D; Voluntary 12th in B flat; Prelude and Fugue in C minor... Samuel Wesley (1766 – 1837) was an English organist and composer in the late Georgian period. Wesley was a contemporary of Mozart and was called by some "the English Mozart." At first outshone by the musical precocity of his elder brother, Charles, he later proved the more talented—indeed, he was the most important English composer of his generation. He received his musical education at second hand through Charles's teachers; his technique developed so rapidly that by 1779 the two brothers began to give series of subscription concerts. These continued until 1785, by which time Samuel had written a considerable body of works including harpsichord sonatas and church and orchestral music, his Overture in D (1784) equaling those of J. C. Bach. His Voluntaries (1805–17) are also among the most important organ music of their time.