HER CREDO

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 612, 14 March 1929, Page 14

HER CREDO

Morini Worships at Shrine of Bach SPIRITUAL ART Miss Erica Moriui. tne wonderful young Viennese violinist, who commences her Australian tour in Sydney at the Town Hall on Easter Saturday, recently expressed some veryinteresting ideas on music, in a letter to a friend. She writes:

“For me the two highest peaks in music are Bach and Beethoven. When I hear Bach’s High Mass I am utterly contented and happy. Bach is my god, but I do not understand him as many other people do. With all his profundity, no one lias more suavity, sunlight, gaiety and joy of living than Bach. Now the Germans, for instance, think that when you play Bach you must put on your long hoots. They think that if you do not play him ‘very broad’ with a very big tone and very seriously, you haven’t understood him. Isn’t it a pity that my god is so misunderstood —or perhaps 1 do not understand him.

“And Mozart. 1 do not understand how you can be” nervous when playing Mozart in public, wh”en you get such satisfaction out of it yourself. It is hard when you have a strong ego (please do not think I am vain, but I don’t know any other way to say it), but the greatest thing for me is to submit the artist to the composer and to play only what he has wi'itten. I am happiest when people say, ‘How wonderful the Kreutzer Sonata is,’ and not, ‘How

wonderfully you played the Kreutzer Sonata.’ For that sort of thing there are other pieces—Sarasate and Weiniawski, for instance, which aren’t so important musically. You can measure them and in them you can show what you can do. But God forbid the intrusion of any ‘personality’ into a Beethoven concerto. “My greatest regret is that I am so young. If I could only persuade people that music has nothing to do with age. Either you have it in you or you don’t get it if you live to be 190 years old. Naturally your art becomes riper with age, but it does not change. For music demands not intellectual but spiritual understanding.”