Oscar's Progress

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 350, 8 March 1946, Page 12

Oscar's Progress

HE familiar recording of Edith Evans and John Gielgud in the scene from Oscar Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest is played again, and one reflects once more, not only that one could listen to this quintessence of irresponsibility for hours together, but that the oddity of such a work from. such an author grows on further consideration. Wilde’s aestheticism and decadence, his deliberate pursuit of the elaborately sensuous and counter-moral, has always (for the modern reader) something heavy, portentous and even pompous about it, until it seems to have led him in Salome to become a monstrously humourless bore; if this is evil beauty it is remarkably lacking in charm. Then one encounters his light comedies, in which for the first time he was not taking himself seriously, and in which for the first and only time his irresponsible flow of contradiction for contradiction’s sake achieved artistic permanence. The Importance of Being Earnest is, of course, itself a smack at solid values; but only consider what gruesome results ensued when Wilde himself became earnest, about passion or whatnot, and the title takes on yet a deeper meaning. Perennial Schubert HERE is a story that Schubert not long before his death contemplated further lessons in the technique of music, This is usually put forward as evidence supporting what some find the insupportable length of some of his music. His sense of form, they say, was weak. On the other hand the story might very weil be interpreted as indicating a selfcriticism developed through achievement, and there is reason to suspect that the length might be in the shortness of the listener’s aural patience rather than in any lack of coherence or conciseness in the music. After listening again to the "Death and the Maiden" Quartet and the "Trout" Quintet this week I was reminded that there is much more to

Schubert’s music than mere melody. Indeed the continued popularity of Schubert lies not only in the felicitous tunes but in the apposite way in which the composer weaves them into the design of his composition and the unerring skill with which the dynamic contrasts are brought out.