I may have mentioned Percy Sherwood before: born 1866, English father, German mother, very high-profile career in Dresden, stranded in Britain in the summer of 1914, no career in England until his death in 1939. When I recorded Sherwood’s complete extant works for cello and piano, I had to start the CD notes from scratch, as practically nothing has ever been written about him. I went through all the references in standard works of musical biography, only to find that many were copied from one another. More recently, the amazing State and University Library in Dresden has been digitizing a number of its holdings, and I spent some very productive hours during the lockdown going through local newspapers and journals. It’s amazing what happens when you piece the snippets of information together. I believe my list of Sherwood’s works is now complete, but I will still have to go to Dresden to consult non-digitized materials. And then there is the question of how to present the material! What will this be – a biography, a case-study of concert life in Dresden, a study in biculturalism? I’m still working on that.
