VULGAR IS AS VULGAR DOES.

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 81, 10 January 1941, Page 4

VULGAR IS AS VULGAR DOES.

Sir,-As the controversy under the above heading threatens to degenerate into a vulgar personal dispute between Mr. Joseph C. McEvoy and myself, it can obviously be of small interest to your readers. This, therefore, is my final letter on the subject. Mr. McEvoy, for several years past has been "trailing" me, in an inexplicable endeavour to find faults in the column about music which I contribute every week to another paper. His attacks usually contain a touch of venom, as though my harmless remarks had done him a personal injury. He fails to see that this kind of thing cannot hurt me, while it completely invalidates whatever case he might have. Abuse is no argument, and I have no intention of indulging in the tempting reprisals which his latest communication, of December 13, would amply justify. It consists mainly of a mass of pointless irrelevancies, covering such widely divergent topics as the poetry of Keats and Burns; the music of Bartok and other composers; an extract from " The Etude"; the idiosyncrasies of Mrs. Gamp and Dick Swiveller the piano-playing of Friedman; and the "ethical code" of L. D. Austin.

I have neither time nor inclination to follow Mr. McEvoy’s aimless meanderings, sir, but there is just one remark I wish to answer-although it has nothing to do with your correspondent’s allegations of "vulgarities and illiteracies" in my " prose" or "literary " style. Mr. McEvoy accuses me of having stigmatized Ignaz Friedman as a "second-rate pianist," before I "had heard the great pianist play a single note." That criticism, Mr. Editor, was written over two years ago, on the strength of some gramophone recordings. Recently I have had the pleasure of listening to Friedman in the flesh, but still see no reason to alter my former opinion. Admittedly, Friedman is a great artist in many respects, and some of his playing was a sheer delight. But even great pianists may be graded, and I place Friedman in the second class on two counts: (a) his inaccurate technique-pianists of the highest class seldom or never play wrong notes (b) his annoying and inexcusable habit of tampering with the text of Chopin’s compositions-what Friedman evidently means by " editing." I did not hesitate to cite these shortcomings while Friedman was still in this country, and neither Mr. McEvoy nor anyone else has been able to disprove my criticism. If this is what your correspondent, sir, calls "sustaining myself in my self-chosen role of Sir Oracle," he entirely misconstrues the function of the music critic. But, of course, this is only on a par with Mr. McEvoy’s characteristic misundertanding.

L. D.

AUSTIN

(Wellington).