RECENT MUSIC

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 166, 28 August 1942, Page 6

RECENT MUSIC

No. 25:

By

Marsyas.

HY has nobody ever told me about Le Carnaval des Animaux before? Here haye I _ been, knowing Saint-Saens as the composer whose music holds my attention for about as long (and for the same reasons) as the announcer holds my attention while he succeeds in pronouncing the man’s name-in fact, just a kind of curiosa felicitas-and in a moment I find this sort of thing going 6n behind my back. Now there’s nothing I like so much, at times, as a patch of musical wit. Not that M. Saint-Saens can make me laugh at my favourite piece of Berlioz just by .guying it inanely, any more than Berlioz can make me grin while he whips up the Dies Irae plain song in a " Witches’ Sabbath." Nor that the strange sounds by which Saint-Saens _represents the braying of a donkey (a very French donkey, in this case) afe any funnier to hear than his own surname; and the skit which comprises trills and scale exercises being repeated a semitone higher each time isn’t painfully laugh-making the second time you hear

it, if it so happens that the announcer has left you to form your own conclusions as to which animal is whatwhich are the long-eared animals, which are the long-legged, which are the things that go boomp in the night and so on. Even that curious parody of his own, Danse Macabre (evidently an allusion to "the things that go, etc.") isn’t the best thing about the Carnival of Animals, this "zoological fantasy " which SaintSaens did not release for public performance during his lifetime. No; Saint-Saens’s most cherished joke in the whole thing was to include in a context of satire, burlesque, punning, and caricature, the whole of that well‘known composition The Swan. I am reminded of a certain witty little illustrated booklet published in the early days of the war by A. R. D. Fairburn wherein, after reading passages in the best vein of James Joyce’s parody, and weird fantastic stories, the reader’s eyes suddenly fall on a poem called " Not Understood " quoted in toto, % * xe AINT-SAENS probably knew that "laugh and the world laughs with you" holds good more than ever when it: happens to be the world you're laughing at. And he wrote Le Cygne for the amusement of his circle of Parisian

friends, having in mind some lady ’cellist who would be enraptured by that chromatic alteration which diverts the opening phrase on its repetition; who would forget for the moment that a woman never looks so ungainly as when straddling the violoncello, and would cast her eyes upwards "like a maid in a heavenly dream," and flutter her eyelids, in an ecstasy of cygnolatry. Le Cygne has served the purposes of a thousand salon musicians, hotel pianists, " Quiet Moods," and "Your Cavaliers," and no one who has not heard it in its original context will permit me my attitude (dare I call it cygnicism?); but there is no doubt at all in my mind. In fact I suspect that the swan of SaintSaens’s acquaintance was a descendant of that other bird of Orlando Gibbons’s, which some 300 years before "thus sung her first and last and sung no more." Farewell all joys, O death, come close mine eyes, ~\ More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise. * EB * HERE I have _ written, above, "there’s nothing I like so much at times as a patch of musical wit," it will be noticed that I took care not to say (Continued on next page)

RECENT MUSIC (Continued from previous page) "a musical ‘patch of wit" in that context. The Carnival of Animals is a patch of musical wit. For a musical patch of wit one turns elsewhere. Take William Walton’s Facade suite (heard from 1YA in the same week) and you have the real thing. To make music in this vein you must have a command of the orchestra at least equal to that of Stravinsky (by which I don’t mean knowing by heart the extremely useful notes and impossible trills of the double bassoon). And you have to take care, if you're poking fun at something, that you choose something to ridicule which you are not in the habit of producing yourself. Facade contains parodies on " pastoral music" and " characteristic music," jazz, and the rest. And one of its most amusing things (included in the second suite) is aimed at all those composers of anything but Spanish origin (mostly French) who have supplied the world with what it knows as "Spanish music." Noche is Spanish for night; Espagnole is French for Spanish. And Noche Espagnole (or "La nuit Spanish") rather suggests that William Walton finds Chabrier, Wald- teufel, Rimsky Korsakov, Moszkowski, Debussy, and Ravel all a bit ludicrous in their Spanish moments. The Viola Concerto, which came res 2YA and 1YX in the same week also, supports the view that its composer is entitled to have a little snigger at others now and then.