Lost in Time

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 487, 22 October 1948, Page 9

Lost in Time

(GEOLOGICALLY speaking, seven hundred years is but,a moment in time; the species homo sapiens_ could not change in any major way between 1200 and 1948. Yet the dominant impression after listening to the 3YA presentation of Prokofieff’s Cantata Alexander Nevsky was of separation and complete unfamiliarity. Not with the music, but with the people, and particularly with those mechanised myths the Teutonic Knights. Apparently Prokofieff sensed deeply this separation, He researched into 12th Century’ music, looking for a theme: for the Knights, but he could find nothing that would have stirred a 20th Century ear. Their expressions of passion, as they advanced across the’ snow from Pskov, were not ours. So Prokofieff wrote grinding modern mechanical dissonances for them, Oddly enough, the modern sets off the ancient perfectly. and there they are, in Nevsky, frighteningly unfamiliar, locked up in their armour senseless and inhuman as railway engines in a rage. What were their thoughts? How did they live? Did they ever smile at small children or potter in the vegetable garden? How were they able to split their personalities sufficiently to reconcile their religious pretensions and their brutality? For all we know of their real selves they might as well have existed on another planet. But the strange thing about this separation in time is its very inconsistency: the Teutonic Knights are unfamiliar and meaningless silhouettes, but it is easy, on the instant, to think of three people who appear to us in the round, living and breathing; their names are Herodotus, Thucydides, and Christ, and they lived further away in time from the Teutonic Knights than those mechanical monsters do from us,