THINGS TO COME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 428, 5 September 1947, Page 4

THINGS TO COME

A Run Through The Programmes

| Christchurch Steals a March | (CHRISPCHURCH, whose __ residents claim that their city is more Eng- | lish than any other in New Zealand, has stolen some of Dunedin’s Centennial thunder. Not from 4YA, but from 3YA, this Friday, September 5, at 7.15 p.m., the first of a series of Otago Centenary talks will be given by Douglas Cresswell. It may be that the plainsmen | want to show the Scots how very much | alive they are to the value of advance publicity; but it may equally be that they are simply anxious to help fellow- | southerners in putting up the best possible show for North Islanders to admire. Mr. Cresswell will.take listeners for a series of rural rides. His talks will describe the founding of the province of | Otago, the discovery of gold, the opening up of the back country, the whalers, the sealers and the early merchants. He will deal with the incredible hardships -and the rewards-that were the lot of the pioneer. Causes of War | A RE wars caused by the inherent evil in man or by ineradicable racial differences? Must wars be considered inevitable because "there have always been wars?" Are the wars of the past comparable with war as-we know it to-day? | Can war be prevented by education? ) These and other questions will be | answered by M. G. Lee in a talk The Peace of Nations in the World Problems Are Our Problems series from 1YA at 7.15 p.m. on Thursday, September 11, when he will make a plea for a ruthless examination of the causes of war. Some of the prejudiced ideas many of us hold are liable to receive a knocking. Mrs. Malaprop HEN in his mellow old age Smollett wrote perhaps his best novel, Humphry Clinker, he introduced readers to Mrs. Winifred Jenkins, whose use, or rather misuse, of the English language was at times rather startling. It seems fairly certain that she was the origin, in part at least, of Mrs. Malaprop in Sheriden’s The Rivals, which was first produced in 1775, five years after Smollett wrote his novel. Mrs. M. is also said to have been taken from the plot of a, work that Sheridan’s mother left among her papers after her death. But whatever her origins, she will always remain one of the greatest characters in fiction to lovers of humour, by reason of her tongue-twisting blunders and inconsequential abuse of the ordinary rules of English grammar and syntax. Mrs. Malaprop will be the subject of further readings by Professor T. D. Adams from 4YA at 9.34 p.m. on Yer September 12. Repaying a Debt ECENT letters from China ieceived by the Presbyterian Missions office in Auckland tell a grim story of famine canditions, caused not only by warfare but also by the vagaries of climate. Such reports, in addition to his own experi- ' ence in China, will provide the back¢roan£ to a talk from 1YA at 7.10 p.m. on Thursday, September 11, by the missiuns director, the Rev. D. N. MacDiarmid, on the forthcoming CORSO appeal

in Auckland. Besides speaking of China’s desperate need for assistance, he will point out that New Zealand owes a debt to China (since,gher bogging down of Japanese forces during the war prevented them being freed to continue the drive south to the Dominion), and that opportunity now exists to help repay that debt. De Rerum Supernatura ALES of the Olympian Gods" is the title of an unusual programme to be heard from 2YA on Monday, September 8, at 9.30 p.m. The narrator is the film star Ronald Colman, whose finely modulated accents recount some of the most

beautiful of the old Greek myths, to the accompaniment of incidental music by Victor Young’s Orchestra. After an introduction in which he tells us that he is taking us back to the Golden Age of Greece when belief in gods was so naive and universal that "every stream had its deity, every forest its wood nymphs," we climb over Mount Olympus into an enchanting world of fairly-tale: Although in parts it tends, in Hollywood fashion, to be over-sentimental, this programme is on the whole done in a picturesque and attractive fashion. The tales chosen are those of Daphne and Apollo, Apollo and Clyte, Diana and Echo, Narcissus, Hyacinth, and Apollo and Phaeton. Poet or Impostor? (CLEVER men, generally rogues out for gain, or practical jokers being practical, have introduced hoaxes into almost every field of human activity. Readers may remember the "Ern Malley Affair" of 1944, and the storm it raised in the Australian literary teacup, and, for that matter, well beyond its rim. They may recall, too, the pronouncements of the men of letters for and against the integrity of the poems sent to the literary periodical Angry Penguins,. and the police prosecution which ended the matter. Literature has had its fair share of hoaxing. Critics have also had their dif-ferences-on a somewhat nobler planeabout the works of the English poet Thomas Chatterton, who died in 1770 at 18 years of age. A monument erected to his memory in Redcliffe churchyard, Bristol, has this inscription, borrowed from his will, and supplied by his own pen: "To the memory of Thomas Chatterton. Reader! Judge not. If thou art a Christian, believe that he shall be judged by a Superior Power. To that Power only is he now answerable." In Station 4YA’s Winter Course series on Tuesday, September 9, listeners will hear |

a talk, "Literary Hoaxes and Forgeries: Chatterton-Poet or Impostor," by B. C. Dowling, reference librarian, University of Otago. é Prince Igor ALTHOUGH he was the first Russian composer to achieve an international reputation, Alexander Borodin did not devote his full time to music. He was, in fact, a nractising physician and professor of chemistry, and could compose only in his spare time, or as he said once, in the little leisure given him by a bad cold in the head. Perhaps this is the main reason why his only grand opera, Prince Igor, on which he had been working spasmodically for 18 years, remained unfinished at his death in 1869, although it is known that he also experienced great difficulties in its composition, especially in building up the libretto. Nevertheless, it is difficult to over-estimate his importance to modern musie, for he had a notable influence on Debussy and Ravel, as well as on many of the technical features of the work of Sibelius and Stravinsky. He was one of the first to realise the possibilities of the old modal scales, and it is on these that the tonal plans of his symphonies, for instance, are founded, rather than on the major-minor system. Prince,/Jgor re-' veals also Borodin’s strong leaning to- = wards Eastern music; and his skirling music of the Steppes, with its insistent rhythms, seems to satisfy some wild and elemental chord in our own natures. In its final form, as completed by RimskyKorsakov and Glazotnov, his opera consists of a Prologue and four Acts, and will be heard from 2YA from 9.32 to 10.45 p.m. on Sunday, September 14.