ABSTRACT
South African composer Arnold van Wyk (1916–83) returned to South Africa in 1946 after eight years in London: the outbreak of World War II had prolonged his intended one-year visit to study at the Royal Academy of Music. The years immediately following his return were among his most productive and creative, and the song cycle Van Liefde en Verlatenheid (1953) testifies to remarkable craftsmanship and a confident compositional voice. This reading considers Van Wyk’s use of directional tonality and advanced mixture in the cycle and particularly in the final song, situating these musical techniques within a rich intertextual and contextual web, including Van Wyk’s correspondence at the time of composition, the layers of reference embedded in Marais’s texts, and the tenor of 1950s Afrikaner culture, referring to contexts such as apartheid, Afrikaner nationalism, racial purity, and the use of indigenous cultural materials.
