Proof of the Pudding
ILL THE END OF TIME, 2ZB’s Friday night feature on the lives of great composers, is culture administered under a light anaesthetic, music doped (continued on next page)
RADIO VIEWSREEL
HESE notes are not written by the staff of "The Listener’ or by any member of the New Zealand Broadcasting Service. They are independent ccmments for which "The Listener" pays outside contributors.
(continued from previous page) up with romance (in its two-fold interpretation as female interest and as tall story). Moussorgski, on a recent Friday, was fairly typical of what I have heard in this series. Artfully, the programme arranger takes up his position in the St. Petersburg of 1881, on the day of Moussorgski’s funeral. He overhears the comments of four of the spectators whose lives have been closely linked with Moussorgski’s-his colonel, his sweetheart, an impresario, a musical colleague-and from these viewpoints we reconstruct the composer’s life. But I have always felt that the composer’s life-story is even less important for the understanding. of his wotks than the poet’s or the artist’s; the average listener interprets a musical composition in terms of his own experience rather than the composer’s. And the musical plums imbedded in the programme (the sardonic gusto of "Song of the Flea," the blithe realism of the "Cossack Dance") seemed as haphazardly placed and as differént in texture from their matrix as the threepences in the Christmas pudding. But let us not, on this account, underestimate the pudding itself. It was the very stuff of. which. good radio programmes are made, a little on the sweet side, perhaps, but good, emotionally rich listening. (Though I refuse to believe that the colonel actually said "Damme, sir, I want no namby-pamby milk-and-water-drinking mother’s boys in my regiment" and ordered the 18-year-old Moussorgski to drink diurnally half a bottle of vodka and a full bottle of champagne. Damme, it’s too much.)
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 456, 19 March 1948, Page 29
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317Proof of the Pudding New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 456, 19 March 1948, Page 29
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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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