SOME RECENT MUSIC

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 142, 13 March 1942, Page 13

SOME RECENT MUSIC

(By

MARSYAS

WO symphonies were my meat last week; it follows that they were someone else’s poison. They were both "big" symphonies. One was Mozart's 39th, the. other was William Walton’s. The first, luckily, came through clearly and without the "noises off" which I had to endure during the Walton. This was as it should have been-Mozart’s crystalline clarity would stand no "noises off." Except in very special circumstances (a rare performance perhaps) one could not listen to any Mozart work from a station subject to interference. But with Walton’s only symphony, it is different. The work is heavily over-scored-great blocks of sound move together, solid chunks of noise-most of it making no subtle approach to your sensibilities. Besides, I had the score. When 3YL’s "carrier" failed and shattering noises overpowered the music, I followed the barlines, cheating a little bit by using my memory of the work to keep up with it, and then when the station surged its way back again I was still in the right place. * * * UT apart from all that, there was something else that struck me after I had heard both of these works. I remembered a drama fiend telling me once how a playwright could do his first act easily; then he wrote the second. The trouble began with the third, and he began to wonder how he would write the "last word." In these two symphonies there is something particular about the "last word." Mozart’s 39th has a magnificent last movement in his raciest finale style, with a little figure of seven semi-quavers as a motive which comes round and round — tiddle-iddle-iddle-um. And this little fragment, which begins the movement and is its germ idea, is the "last word." It ends a whole symphony, abruptly, yet it is utterly appropriate. It is a tiny twiddle, a mere flick of Mozart’s pen, and it is more perfect as the last word than any of Beethoven's mighty codas. William Walton, on the other hand, far from being able to finish his finale, was for a long time unable even to start it. The announcer told us this, in the annotation that is always read with the symphony. The first three movements were performed, to satisfy public demand, while the composer was still scratching his head over what the symphony would say in the finish. When at last the finale did appear, it had its weaknesses. As a friend of mine remarked: "When a composer is so dried up that he has to start a fugue as the second subject of his finale, he is pretty far gone."

But there it stands, that great peroration, a tonal blitz, inviting cruel comparison with Mozart’s perfect solution of the same problem, I shall go back to my drama fiend and tell him I know what he means when he says the last word is the hardest one to write. % ES * YMPHONIES were my meat. In search of something different, I listened’to what the programmes told me would be "The Westron Wynde," sung from the studio at 1YA. I particularly wanted to hear this song, an old sixteenth century English poem, with a contemporary setting in the Dorian mode. The poem, I knew; it has a place near the front of good anthologies of English verse: the tune I knew from a version taken by a New Zealander from the British Museum. But I was due for disappointment. Apart from a few very insignificant differences in the melody it was still modal, though I was shocked to find that the poem had been tampered with. Are we all to be bound by a Puritan tradition which a few have inherited? The lines which had been removed were: Christ, if my love were in.my arms And I in my bed again! If lovers in bed are good enough for the Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century verse, to be had in any good library, and no doubt in most of the . secondary schools, are they not fit for the radio audience? The editors of The Weekend Book were not afraid to put the poem at the front of their "Great Poems" the first thing in the book. Why should a singer fear it? Compilers of "editions" are too fond of removing "dubious" passages from works of art they do not comprehend. Even singers are sometimes prepared to assume that responsibility. Here was I, (a most sympathetic listener for the ¢g reason that I was glad some enterprising singer had unearthed a treasure of English music which is too rarely heard) but I was immediately put off, and I even failed to enjoy the music. * * % EXACTLY the same thing happened to A. E. Housman when his "Shropshire Lad" poems ("On Wenlock Edge," Vaughan Williams) were sung in Christchurch once. The unfortunate poet was simply over-ruled, rendered "inoffensive." We are used to hearing Shakespeare’s "cuckold" bowdlerised (in "When Daisies pied") but we are not going to be used to having all our perfectly printable poems altered to. suit the "feelings" of bashful singers, Bashful singers will have to choose songs which do not offend them. Housman, Shakespeare, and the anonymous poet of the 16th century must lie still in their graves. If Housman’s ghost asked us "Is my team ploughing that I was used to drive?" could we honestly answer "No change, though you lie under the land you use to plough"? If the writer of "The Westron Wynde" rose from his unknown grave and questioned us, would he settle back satisfied and say "The small rain down can rain"? And would Shakespeare have to repeat "Oh word of fear, unpleasing to e married ear’?