Arnold van Wyk's ‘Five Elegies’

Extract

Arnold van Wyk's Five Elegies for String Quartet, of which miniature score and parts have recently been published, were written during 1940–41 and were first performed in 1942 at the National Gallery Concerts in London.

The title alone might suggest a set of five separate pieces cast in a uniformly grey mood. Such an impression would be false, however, for the work is essentially a single whole, and it covers an unexpectedly wide emotional range. This is perhaps less surprising when one considers how different are one's reactions at different times to the thought of impermanence and decay. (It may be worth remembering, in this connection, that the work was written in wartime London, at the height of the Blitz.) Indeed, the Elegies contain all the variety, in themselves and between one another, that one would expect in a work lasting eighteen or nineteen minutes. But this diversity is always unified by an underlying elegiac mood.