Music, Madness, Murder

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 418, 27 June 1947, Page 12

Music, Madness, Murder

FTER seeing more than one film exploiting the fact that a woman may be young, beautiful, brainy, and yet able to play the piano like a virtuoso, I felt that the theme of John Gundry’s play Campéground’s Over Jordan was just a little trite for 1947. Yet I couldn’t help listening to the bitter ending of the play (I mean bitter in its strict sense, since Mr. Gundry wisely made no final concession to popular liking for the "happy ending"), merely for the satisfaction of hearing that final pistol-shot which I correctly anticipated would end the play. Indeed, the thing which kept my radio turned on was not sympathy with the heroine, a world-famous pianist unhappily married, but my acknowledgment that Mr. Gundry in’the character of the music-hating husband, has drawn a thoroughly detestable portrait; all through the piece I longed for someone to take a shot at this monster in professorial robes, and I can’t say that I registered anything but intense satisfaction when he was liquidated, the self-righteous humbug! However,’I doubt if Mr. Gundry meant his hearers to feel the same way about his heroine. Possibly she was intended to enlist sympathy, but she got hone of mine. Any world-famous pianist who would give up music voluntarily, and continue to cower under the intellectual dictatorship of her husband, until! he drove her to madness and murderweil, my conclusion was that she must have been either a little insane to begin with, or else not a true musician; either way, the plot lost point. Radio plays about musicians suffer from the same necessary and inherent difficulties as films about musicians-if authors include too much action, they offend the musicians; if they include too much music they offend the listeners who want plot. I’m sometimes inclined to think such stories should omit music altogether and concentrate on drama; musicians would rather hear the music complete and unabridged, as they can do at any tite by means of records, unhindered by wondering in the meantime who is going to bump off whom.