Dickens and Music

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 408, 18 April 1947, Page 8

Dickens and Music

HAVE listened to two programmes of Dickens and Music from 2YD on Monday nights (signature tune "Greensleeves"), and there are two questions I ask myself-first, what began it, and

second, where will it all end? To ponder the second question first, there seems no reason why this type of session should not start a whole cycle of radio programmes. There are dozens of reputable authors, and the probability is that each mentions music several times per novel and sometimes oftener. Dickens’s Harold Skimpole plays the piano, so we spend a couple of minutes listening to someone playing the piano as Skimpole might have played it. Very well, then, let Galsworthy’s Irene or H. E. Bates’s Catherine Foster have a turn. And if we want a violin solo why not have Yehudi Menuhin doubling for Sherlock Holmes, thus capturing a double audience? And music and sweet pvoetrv vro-

verbally agree even better than music and sweet prose. Shakespeare is a sitting bird for any script-writer, and a programme of Music and Tennyson — "Music as the LotusEaters Heard It’"would be welcome as a late evening ses-

sion. The first question permits of even wider conjecture. My favourite conjecture is Seven Script-Writets in Search of a Subject, and my comment would be similar to Algernon’s on Jack’s appearance in The Importancé of Being Earnest: "I never saw anyone take so long to dress, and with so little result." However, the session has its moments: we are wiser through knowing that "For England, Home and Beauty" is a phrase from the contemporary ballad The Death of Nelson (rhyming naturally . with "duty"), dnd through having heard The Ratcatcher’s Daughter, a ballad whose macabre cheerfulness seems appropriately Dickensian.