MASSES OF BACHS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 284, 1 December 1944, Page 7

MASSES OF BACHS

| Sir,-Your correspondent, H. R. L. Blanks, in advocating the purchase of Bach’s Mass in B Minor, does not perhaps realise that the placing of this order is but a small part of the time and trouble the Broadcasting authorities must spend on this recording before it could be made acceptable to the New Zealand public. As I listened recently to the broadcast recording of Don Giovanni it occurred to me that if Disney and his friends have revealed the beauty of classical music used as a background to a fantasy of moving cartoons, we in New Zealand have shown that it is equally suitable as a background to a human voice moving in a vivid running commentary. From the music alone I am sure that I would never have gathered that anything exciting was happening, but with Mozart’s so-called climaxes cleverly "faded out," and a convincing voice assuring me that "this is a most dramatic moment," I knew exactly where I was. I have glanced at Bach’s Mass since it became the subject of controversy, and it seems to me that though the music is in Bach’s usual tedious, square-cut style, the plot has definite possibilities. If the authorities here have time to edit the recording, working up the dramatic aspect and rendering the musical elements less conspicuous, we should have a work of high entertainment value. It is with some diffidence that I enter this controversy, for I understand from previous correspondence that to decide which of the prolific Bach family wrote which of their prolific works is a business which often confuses even the experts; and we may find, after wasting much ink and paper, that we are all talking about different Masses in the same key, written by different people of the same name.

D. F.

T.

(Auckland).