WOOD's lifelong encounter with J.S. Bach began at home. Born to a mother who possessed a ‘beautiful soprano (the real Welsh) voice’, and a father who was an amateur cellist and tenor at St Sepulchre's, Holborn Viaduct, Wood was exposed to church and chamber music from a young age. He had a precocious talent for the organ, and although his autobiographical account of acquiring candles to study keyboard works late into the night chimes suspiciously with the story of Bach doing the same at the house of his older brother Johann Christoph, Bach dominates Wood's memory of his significant youthful performances. In June 1883, for example, while attending the International Fisheries Exhibition in South Kensington as a fourteen-year old, he recounted he needed just ‘a little persuasion’ to perform an impromptu recital and play ‘the E minor prelude and fugue of Bach from memory’, and at his first formal lesson with the St Sepulchre's organist, Dr Edwin Lott, he played ‘Bach's F major Toccata’. Whether or not these accounts are strictly accurate, Wood was certainly invited back to the Fisheries Exhibition, and scrapbooks, meticulously compiled by his father, reveal details of recitals in which Wood performed several works by Bach.

Although his father, Henry Joseph Wood senior, was of relatively modest means, Wood emphasised that he ‘never missed a chance of taking me to anything of importance in London’, and furthermore that ‘he sent me to Germany, Bavaria, France, Belgium, and America’. While there is considerable doubt over the precise details of such foreign trips, programmes survive in the Wood Archive that confirm his attendance at St James's Hall (where he heard the Joachim Quartet and many eminent singers), the Crystal Palace (where he saw August Manns conduct), and even the exclusive Philharmonic Society concerts. Wood also describes performances of Bach at home. Two amateur violinists, Peter Jerome and William Gunthorpe, visited the Wood household regularly for their ‘chamber-music Mondays’.