Vivat Bacchus

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 297, 2 March 1945, Page 8

Vivat Bacchus

SWITCHED on rather late to a 3YA recording advertised as "Student Songs" and heard, somewhat to my surprise, the music announcing that there was qa tavern in the town. I had not known exactly what to expect, but this took me by surprise for a moment until I remembered the contents of a large decaying anthology called the "Students’ Song Book." This put me on the right track--those odd 19th century ditties in German and dog-Latin and Aberdeen

Scots and even Gaelic, not to mention English; sentimental, facetious, most often bacchanalian, but all characterised by a faint heartiness and a dim adumbration of adolescent moustaches. Many are extinct, many still crop up with varying regularity in the programmes of glee clubs, but quite a few, most surprisingly of all, survive with indomitable persistence in the very different student repertoire and tradition of today. The lusty romanticism which gave

them birth has faded like the dew on the leaf before the ungentle warmth of "Frankie and Johnny," the little-known masterpiece called "Weeping and Wailing," and others which shall be nameless; but these odd bowler-hatted ghosts still start up from time to time to recall a past which made _ such strenuous efforts after dissipation, but which seems to us who eome after so singularly innocent.