2. 2 March 1966 (id.; Martin Cooper on Schumann; Frank Walker on Wolf)

Dear Andrew,

   I enclose a Brown rehash, which by all means leave to one side if for any reason it seems unpalatable. I did my best to keep it dull, on the approved Sunday Times lines, but I'm afraid that, cheerfulness kept on breaking in. I find myself thinking nowadays that any writing thatisn't flippant is probably unsound; though I quite see that this is not – yet – a universally held view. It's probably just the onset of middle age, which somehow tends to make people factitiously facetious (putting on wit, so to speak) – it's a kind of desperation.

   The references to Arthur Hutchings and Mosco Carner are, respectively, Master Musicians 1945 p.106 "the original move after the C major close was the announcement of a little fugato, which was very fortunately crossed out...." and Symposium 1946 pp. 85 & Ex 64: "its first version – (Ex 64) suggests that Schubert may have contemplated a fugato at this point". All very puzzling!

   The notion of checking references led me back to Martin Cooper, and I had another look at his figures for Schumann's poets. I now see (I think) how he gets 42 instead of 38 for Heine; it's done by counting the texts of Op. 53 No 3 (Der arme Peter) and Op. 64 No 3 (Tragödie) as three poems each; which is wrong for both Heine and Schumann, but at least not entirely ludicrous. Tragödie is traditionally (wrongly, from stylistic and other evidence) attributed to 1841, so that would explain it if he had said that 39 out of the 42 were written in 1840; but 37 is still a puzzle. [...]

   I've arranged to have access to the text of the important chapter etc that Frank Walker had to omit from his Wolf book "out of regard for the feelings of living people"; but I expect that Walter Legge knows about this and has read it already? If he hasn't already got the Wolf/Melanie Köchert correspondence he may like to know it was published as "Briefe an Melanie Köchert”, herausgegeben von Franz Grasberger, by Hans Schneider, Tutzing, 1964.

  Yours ever

   Eric