Despite the strict laws imposed by the Apartheid government during his lifetime, van Wyk's homosexuality was ignored by the authorities throughout his career due to the nationalistic nature of his music.
[1] Arnoldus Christiaan Vlok van Wyk was born on 26 April 1916 on the farm Klavervlei, not far from Calvinia, a small town in the Northern Cape province of South Africa.
The couple married when farming provided reasonable hopes of financial security, however Van Wyk's father was never an efficient manager of the business.
[2] From as early as 1918, the family struggled financially, his father Arnoldus Christiaan Vlok van Wyk abused his wife and children.
After a few months at the Royal Academy, Van Wyk wrote in a letter:[4] This evening after I had done some decent practicing, I played some of my earlier pieces—the "Nocturne," the "Bagatelles," the "Romanza" & "Mazurka" and this has put me in a nice, blue sentimental mood.
To supplement his income, Van Wyk took a job at the recently formed Afrikaans section of the BBC, where he worked as announcer, translator, deviser of programmes, and newsreader, for the remainder of his time in London.
Other works performed during Van Wyk's stay in England were of his First Symphony, also conducted by Sir Henry Wood, as part of a special BBC broadcast on South Africa's Union Day celebrations in 1943, and the Saudade for violin and orchestra, originally the middle movement of the Violin Concerto, performed by violinist Olive Zorian at an Albert Hall Promenade Concert conducted by Sir Adrian Boult.
[10] At a public lecture in 1955 for the Commonwealth section of the Royal Society of Arts, critic Stewart Hylton-Edwards pointed out that Van Wyk would not be capable "to write English music to the end of his days".
[11] Another argues that Van Wyk felt exploited by the nationalists and that they were only concerned with his contribution to the cultivation process of South African Art Music.
To avoid any further connections with the Afrikaner Nationalists, Van Wyk accepted an appointment as lecturer in Music at the English-speaking University of Cape Town, a post that "promised security while allowing some time for composition and piano playing".
[14] Although Van Wyk composed simply because he wanted to create "beautiful things," his connection to the ideologies of Afrikaner Nationalism was unavoidable.
[14] Toward the end of his career Van Wyk was attracted by the idea of composing unaccompanied vocal works, such as his "Aanspraak virrie latenstyd" (1973–83) and his "Missa in illo tempore" (1979).
Van Wyk was aware of the stylistic limitations of his own music, but also followed the so-called 'post-modern' European compositional developments, with composers such as Hindemith, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg.
This "lack of strong inner creative direction" is also evident in van Wyk's "frequent use of imported material of various kinds as the basic points of departure for further musical treatment".
[22] During his stay in the UK, and thanks to his friendship with Ferguson, Van Wyk socialised with the likes of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gerald Finzi, of which both were following the 'after wave' of post-Elgar tonal idioms.
[23] Soon after, he became interested in the compositional techniques of Benjamin Britten, who followed the models of composers such as Igor Stravinsky, Alban Berg, and Gustav Mahler.
[24] He often used poetry and literature as point of departure for the establishment of compositional titles: Vier Weemoedige Liedjies, Van Liefde en Verlatenheid, and Vyf Elegieë vir Strykkwartet.
"[27] In 2014, South African musicologist Stephanus Muller published "Nagmusiek", which provides both scholarly analyses and fictionalised interpretations of the life and works of Arnold van Wyk.
[28] The Stellenbosch University musicology department added a South African music course to the curriculum in 2017[29] which studies works from Van Wyk, Hendrik Hofmeyr, William Henry Bell, Jeanne Zaidel-Rudolph, and Andile Khumalo.