Baksheesh, Baksheesh

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 360, 17 May 1946, Page 11

Baksheesh, Baksheesh

"THE music of Albert W. Ketelbey ‘was a recent 3YL feature. Ketelbey of the Persian Market and the Chinese Temple and Monastery Gardens, was essentially an exponent, with Hermann Lohr and Teresa del Riego and worse, of the drawing-room ballad tradition-to which cruel decision a quarter-hour of his music forced the listener to accede. It is not without its pleasures, possibly even its merits, but an unfaltering fruitiness and gelatinous tremulosity pervades all. One realises that the more distressing varieties of mournfully amorous songs of our own day have their pedigree. Nevertheless the drawing-room ditty had two marked advantages. When it had words, the words had meaningfrequently disastrously lacking in merit and recalling translations of the classics made by Victorian statesmen and spinsters, spraying "thou" and "thy" about

the page-but the translations they 1esembled were made from a definite body of literature by persons nurtured, however incompletely, in a definite educational tradition. The gelatine was shaped in a known mould... A later day has achieved almost pure meaninglessness, the words being no more than formulae referring to one and a-half, and one and a-half only, of the numberless gamut of emotions known to man. Second, the Victorian style lent itself admirably to affectionate caricature. To hear an oldster, familiar. with the pure drawing-room-cum-music-hall. manner of tearjérking, sing "A Beautiful Picture in a Beautiful Golden Frame" or even "A

Bird in a Gilded Cage" is an expeisence of real if ridiculous charm. Not so Ketelbey, I fear; his career extended into the early days of the cinema, and composing for theatre orchestras did something to him.