Bright But Not Trite

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 310, 1 June 1945, Page 8

Bright But Not Trite

F all composers who ever put crotchets on a five-lined stave, I suppose John Sebastian Bach must be the only one who never wrote a trite phrase. We can all name those compositions in which the great masters were caught napping; uninspired, insipid, or second-rate works which present the composer at his worst, and which we simply overlook as being inexplicable and of no importance compared with the greater output of the composer’s works. But nowhere in Bach’s music can we lay a finger on anything of this sort. While not all his works are on the lofty spiritual heights of his great religious cantatas, when he does descend toa mundane plane he is never anything

less than delightful, and his secular cantatas, which provide a case in point, contain some of the liveliest, most cheerful music ever written. The "Coffee Cantata," heard from 4YA, has little to do with the beverage itself. nor does it

concern itself with the reflections of the coffee-addict as his "Tobacco Song".does with those of the contemplative smoker. It is, as the announcer said, a jibe at the women of Leipzig-as though some modern composer in jocular vein were to compose an airy trifle upon the subject of the modern housewife’s tea-drink-ing. To hear this entire cantata was a (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) happy experience, and prompts the thought that Bach wrote a number of such gay works which I hope we shall also hear in their entirety.