SNOBBISHNESS IS IN ART, TOO

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 418, 27 June 1947, Page 10

SNOBBISHNESS IS IN ART, TOO

The Fetish About Foreigners

Written for "The Listener’

by

ALAN

MULGAN

OLIN HORSLEY has come back to us after his successes in Britain. We hope Alan Loveday will do the same before long. Both have resisted temptations to belong to other nations. They. have not called themselves Colinska and Lovedeskov respectively, for which we should be thankful. It would be interesting, however, if we could find out through a Gallup Poll what effect, if any, their retention of plain British names has\ upon the size of their audiences and their prestige, I am quite willing to lead’ off this poll

with a frank contession. Like many other New Zealanders, I have been following Alan Loveday’s career

in England with keen interest, but I cannot quite reconcile myself.to the idea of a young chap with that name winning fame as a violinist. To a lesser degree a Colin Horsley as a star pianist seems against what we are accustomed to. Why there should be this difference I don’t know. Perhaps ft is because I have seen and heard Mr. Horsley, but have no direct knowledge of the work of Mr. Loveday: I make this confession of set purpose. It seems to me to illustrate a state of affairs on which I want to comment. I don’t mean I think it is impossible for a Colin Horsley or an Alan Loveday to reach first rank. I mean this; like many other Britons, I am so accustomed to leading players with foreign names and have so deeply absorbed the tradition of foreigners being superior, that when I come upon a British name I have to pull myself up with a slight jerk and consider the situation. There is something strange about it. The curious thing is that though I can view my attitude with complete detachment, that I can stand beside and watch myself "be’avin’ like a bloomin’ fool," I have not yet succeeded in getting rid entirely of this old prejudice. I think this may be called snobbishness. Thackeray wrote a classic study of contemporary social snobbishness, but has anyone written a history of the malady? When did the movement begin that gave such a rank and reeking growth in the 19th Century? In Tudor and Stuart times there was plenty of class distinction, but not the snobbishness that we know. The country gentleman cheerfully sent his sons into trade. Chesterton saw the cause in "the refusal to take one side or the other heartily in the French Revolution." Others, I suppose, would put its birth in the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the middle class. Cult of the Over-Serious Social snobbishness is the most dangerous to society, but possibly it is less insidious than other forms, because it is so often pointed out and ridiculed. The complete historian of snobbishness should treat of intellectual and esthetic snobbishness as well. The intellectual or gsthetic snob despises his brother : of lower level (or in some cases merely different) ‘pursuits and preferences, A

contemporary dramatist records that he offended his intellectual friends by writing a costume comedy. They held that he should have gone on writing plays with a purpose. Possibly the success of the comedy had something to do with their attitude. This is the cult of the over-serious, ‘The low-brow snob ostentatiously holds aloof from the intellectual. There is, or was, a cult of frivolity at Oxford and Cambridge. You affect to skim lightly and brightly over the surface of the most serious subjects. To take them seriously is bad form. I suppose the Pharisee might be called a moral snob. ; j

The more or less, " blind worship of the », foreigner in the arts is one phase of this snobbishness.’ Of the

arts, music has been the most productive of the condition, This, I take it, sprang mainly from the decline of England from her old eminence in music, and the fact that the great composers of later centuries (leaving out our own time as too near for judgment), were all foreigners. The Puritan element remained strong, English music became largely imitative, and the chief models were Germanic. Provision of certain forms of music was left to foreigners, just as in the Rome of the Empire it was left to Greeks, One may imagine a gifted young Roman saying it wasn’t any good; the Greeks had all the prestige, and if he wanted to do anything he’d better take a Greek name. Among the English ruling classes music was something to be enjoyed if a professional supplied it, and that professional would be a foreigner, but for*an English gentleman to take it up-well, there was the Prince Consort; he actually played the piano, confound him! What's in a Name? The great popularity of Italian opera and Italian operatic singers caused British performers to prefer Italianate or Latinate names when they thus professionalised themselves. Campbell became Campo Bello. Our New Zealand tenor Hubert Cart-er became Cart-a,. If there was justification for this, one finds it in the success of Australia’s greatest singer. If Melba had faced the world as Nellie Armstrong, would she have conquered it? Would we be enjoying "Péche Armstrong"? Instrumentalists have tended to go to the Slavs for names Ethel Liggins made herself a pianist and conductor of note, but it was as Ethel Leginska. Perhaps she kept the "Ethel" as a gesture to her native country. Alicia Markova, a leading ballerina, is Alice Marks, of London. The richest oxemnpincsaidets because of its amusing yet serious sequel, is provided by Allan Foley, of Tipperary, one of the world’s great bassos in the second (continued on next page)

yf x (continued from previous page) half of the 19th Century. Foley had a repertoire of sixty operas, sang in several continental countries, and was equally successful in oratorio and ballads. He toured New Zealand, and laughed when he saw a_half-empty house. "I can draw a crowd anywhere at home," he said. But to the public Allan Foley was Signor Foli, with an "i." He had tried to get on as Foley and failed. And so deeply embedded was the legend that when he was dramatised for the BBC not long ago, he was described as a "celebrated Italian singer," and made to speak’ in the conventional stage Italian-English. Someone wrote and quoted the inscription over his grave at Southport. Thus snobbishness may falsify history. The Case of Sullivan My-test of an encyclopeedia of music is its treatment of Arthur Sullivan. If ,I find that it gives details of his religious music and then says he also composed a number of light operas, I write it down. It is now generally recognised that the Sullivan of The Mikado is more important than the other Sullivan, but the struggle that has produced this result has been long, and also instructive and diverting. What delayed recognition more than anything else was prejudice against lighter forms of composition as ’ unworthy of a composer’s genius, The Oratorio-ists and the Lost Chordists fought. for possession of Sullivan with the Savoyists, and denied their opponents any claim upon his services. For a long while the ideal of a monopoly for solemnity lay heavy upon English music. The late Thomas F. Dunhill, critic and »9omposer, says in his critical apprecia"(tion of Sullivan’s comic operas that in the ‘nineties a student at the Royal College of Music "hardly dared to express an admiration for Sullivan either to his professor or to his fellow students." Dunhill might have quoted the jibe of Jimmy Glover, the theatre conductor, that the _ musical academies of England had not produced one good tune. The obituary notice of Sullivan in The Times regretted that he should have "set him-

self to rival Offenbach and Lecocq, instead of competing on a level of high seriousness with such musicians as Sir Hubert Parry and Professor Stanford." In his revised edition of History of Music in England,. published in 1924, Professor Ernest Walker, of Oxford, did not abate a jot his contempt for Sullivan. This drew from Dunhill the broadside that his estimate of Sullivan was "so. cruelly crooked, unfair and truculent, that one can hardly believe that a cultured man could have dared to put his signature to it." Early on, the Germans received The Mikado as great comic-opera, pro-

duced it in all their leading musical centres, and gave it to their most famous conductors, including Nikisch. While. they were doing this, Sullivan’s colleagues at home were deploring what they regarded as the shocking levity of his methods, and shaking their heads over the circumstance that one of their number should descend to the debasing occupation of writing music which others less learned than themselves could listen to with pleasure." It is part of the joke, however, that Sullivan himself-on some measure at any rate-was with the oratorio-ists. He always wanted to do something better than light opera. He was torn between two worlds. When he presented Dame Ethel Smyth with the manuscript of The Golden Legend he said it was the best thing he had done. However, that intellectual composer with a sense of’ proportion and humour (they are much the same thing) replied that he would be remembered by The Mikado. Dame Ethel did not think it beneath her dignity to write an appreciation of the operas for the London Mercury. Gilbert also had strong ambitions. for higher things and wrote serious plays that are now forgotten. Working over many years, public opinion has settled the matter for both men. There is a lesson for us in all this. As I have said, snobbishness is not confined to social life. The only preventive of it in its various forms is the open mind.