Mr H. M. Lund.

Press, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20489, 7 March 1932, Page 8

Mr H. M. Lund.

It is our melancholy duty this morning to announce the death of Mr H. M. Lund, our greatly loved writer on music. Mr Lund came to Christchurch more than fifty years ago, after a period of preparation that made his arrival in any part of New Zealand a most surprising and beneficent accident. Now that he is dead an era, as Dr. Bradshaw points out, dies witli him. For it is not merely that he had known Brahms, von Bulow, and Wagner, listened frequently to Rubinstein and Liszt, and been finished off as a player by Madame Schumann. He inherited,, and as long as he lived expressed and passed on, a tradition that dominated European music for 150 years, and it is impossible now that his place should be filled. It is not even possible to wish it to be filled, however poor we feel without him. For a man of talent who lives to his eighty-fifth year, working almost to his last day, is like a tree that lives till it tops the forest and then suddenly falls; and Mr Lund had more than talent. He had personality and character, and if he had lived what the world calls clumsily a life of action, or devoted himself to other branches of the life of the spirit, languages, or letters, or philosophy, or science, he would still have been remarkable. Just how remarkable he was in the sphere that he did choose is sufficiently indicated in the tributes of Dr. Bradshaw and Mr Empson; but there is one word that we may be permitted to add ourselves. Dr. Bradshaw says, and it could not' be better said, that our columns in future will be "sadly the poorer in the absence of " hjs enlightened wisdom." We can go further and say that criticism will be poorer by the loss of a talent for saying, in an adopted language, what has never in New Zealand yet been so well said in any language, and can seldom, in such narrow limits of space and time, have been so well said anywhere. Ib was a gift that was part and parcel of a rare mind 'and a rarer character, and it remained to the end.