DÉJÀ VU History just keeps on repeating itself…

Malcolm Arnold’s daughter Katherine has launched a bid to prevent a portion of the composer’s archive being destroyed by the state and placed instead in the National Archive. The documents, dating from 1979-86 when Arnold (left) was in a psychiatric hospital, are of biographical and musicological importance, say researchers. Katherine Arnold is not the first family member to have a say in what happens to a composer’s papers… Anna Magdalena Bach was so hard-up after her husband’s death that she was forced to sell many of his manuscripts, often for pitiful sums. In contrast, Constanze Mozart did very nicely out of her late husband’s scores, putting them in order and publishing them. She was assisted by the Danish diplomat Georg Nissen, with whom she would later enjoy a happy second marriage. While we have Imogen Holst to thank for an intimate biography of her father, Gustav, she admitted to being lax with his affairs and that much of the composer’s correspondence and other written material had been lost. In 1996, Arnold Schoenberg’s heirs won a legal battle to move the Austrian’s archive, worth around $50m, from the University of California, reasoning that it would be better preserved elsewhere. A new research centre was set up in Vienna two years later. And, just two years ago, an outcry followed the announcement that many of Elgar’s documents were to be relocated from Worcestershire to the British Library. The transfer, however, was in line with the request set out in the will of Elgar’s daughter Carice in 1970.