Dear Peter

The death of Peter Williams, on the day before Bach’s 331st birthday, formed a touching little link between the great composer and his most perceptive modern biographer.

Peter was a close friend from the time when I was music critic of The Scotsman and he was a lecturer, and later professor, in the music department of Edinburgh University. We were neighbours. living round the corner from each other, he in a flat at the bottom of classical Dublin Street, I in a flat - upstairs from the artist Anne Redpath -  in London Street. Between us, overlooking Drummond Place, lived the celebrated Scottish tenor John Rainsh.

I first heard Peter play the harpsichord -  he was a deservedly renowned exponent of the Goldberg Variations, acute, illuminating, fascinatingly  improvisational  -  in a recital of baroque rarities with the violinist Leonard Friedman, up from London to make his first Edinburgh appearance at the Reid Concert Hall (he stayed on and founded the Scottish Baroque Ensemble.) It was an event that has stuck in my memory for almost fifty years.

Peter and I soon got to know each other and he invited me to a party at his home where the guest of honour was Dover Wilson, Edinburgh’s senior Shakespeare scholar.

Other get-togethers followed, in one house or the other, along with many conversations during concert intervals at the Usher Hall and elsewhere. Peter was already the most quizzical of Bachians, a dedicated Wagnerian, a passionate Mahlerite. When I became the Edinburgh Festival’s programme editor, a sideline I performed for sixteen years, he was one of the first people from whom I sought programme notes, which I collected from him in batches at his home - by then he had moved to nearby Northumberland Street, in company with a fine harpsichord and a big Adler typewriter, where we chatted about our enthusiasms - not only Bach, as I have just indicated - over glasses of Dutch gin, a taste he had presumably acquired from the Dutch harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt, whose pupil he had been.

The international shortage of knowledge about Bach’s life never perplexed him. He discovered what he needed to know through the music (particularly the organ music) itself and through a form of Sherlock Holmesian osmosis. He  startled readers with his discoveries. The most sensational of these was that Bach was not the composer of the great organ Toccata and Fugue in D minor, so long associated with his name. In fact it was a solo violin piece by someone else, just as Bach’s civic duties, especially through the St Matthew and St John Passions with their Easter associations, were not as straightforward as they  seemed.

As Leipzig’s  famous cantor and municipal music director, Bach had been expected as a matter of routine to attend, and direct his choristers, at grisly Easter scenes of public execution - by the sword (for women), by hanging (for Jews) , and, worst of all, by the wheel (for more serious crimes) - in an area patrolled by the army and the clergy outside the city walls.

As Peter once put it about  the Passions, “Something of the intensity is lost when we sit silently listening to them, with knowledge neither of such things nor of the usual Good Friday traditions.” But it does help to explain the grimness of the music,and of baroque musical pietism in its darkest form, with its whips and thorns, torture and trickling blood, rather than melodious abstractions offset by the words.

Death, as  Peter reminded us, was a perpetual presence in Bach’s life, in his numerous church cantatas and in domestic tragedies - he  once returned from a trip to find his first wife dead and buried.  The last of Peter’s studies of Bach, whose proofs he was reading at the time of his death at the age of 78, will be published this summer.

When he left Edinburgh to become a professor at Duke University, South  Carolina, - where the Scottish composer Iain Hamilton also taught - we largely lost touch with each other. I had resigned from my editorship of the  Edinburgh Festival’s programme notes, and Peter was seldom back in Scotland - though a recital of Bach’s Two-Part Inventions celebrated his recovery from an accident he suffered in his semi-retirement, when he was living in a manor house in Gloucestershire and fell on top of his electric lawnmower, mutilating one of his hands.  With movement restored to his fingers, he managed to  play again and went on writing - as his last book will confirm when it is published this summer.
11 April 2016