Well-bred Music
"MENDELSSOHN AND HIS MUSIC" from 3YA reminds us that this composer is another who has suffered by the adulation of his friends. Mendelssohn’s music is not fashionable to-day because, for one thing, it is of a quality most susceptible to the vagaries of fashion. It is elegant music, polished, refined, aristocratic; there is never a wrong note. In an age devoted to the comforting actuality of realism when even music may be expected to have social and philosophical implications, the complete detachment of Mendelssohn’s music does not find much favour. It is well-bred music. Its elegance is more than an absence of vulgarity. It is a positive perfection of purely musical values. Mendelssohn’s friends of past decades who have‘attempted to flatter by imitation have @ped the manners without giving them the substance of breeding or the finish of technical competence. In consequence his detractors confuse art with artifice, and mistake sincerity for artificiality, Mendelssohn is not a great composer in the line of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, but I would wager his stocks will yet rise again.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19460531.2.28.6
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 362, 31 May 1946, Page 15
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179Well-bred Music New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 362, 31 May 1946, Page 15
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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