MORE LIGHT ON GOETHE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 528, 5 August 1949, Page 6

MORE LIGHT ON GOETHE

Aspen, Colorado, JULY 11. LITTLE over 50 years ago, the world’s largest silver nugget was mined at Aspen, 8,000 feet up in the Colorado Rockies; it weighed nearly a ton and was 95 per cent. pure ore. The town,then had a population of 15,000, 27 ‘lawyers, a horse-drawn tram and an opera house. The Silver Repeal Bill of 1893 ruined Aspen overnight. Settlers packed out leaving furniture and unwashed dishes. About a thousand of them stayed, and these families have managed somehow to live here ever since. The unused houses fell down, were burned down, or bought for firewood. Until lately a good house could be bought for the price of its land tax. In . 1946 a Chicago manufacturer noticed the ski-ing possibilities of Aspen; he formed a company which bought the only remaining hotel and other property, and built the world’s longest chair-lift. This can take 225 persons per hour to the height of 11,300 feet in 35 minutes without the waste of any footpounds. Now in July, 1949, Aspen runs more Goethe scholars per acre than any other part of the world, and more people who are carrying around the works of Goethe with every intention of reading them. America celebrates here the bicentennial of Goethe’s birth in a threeweek programme which includes lectures and symposia on pretty well every aspect of Goethe’s life and thought, much of the vast amount of music Goethe’s work inspired, music that inspired Goethe, and other music not too

= modern. Among the lecturers are Albert Schweitzer (from Lambareme, French Equatorial Africa), José Ortega y Gas set (Madrid), Robert Hutchins (Chicago), T. M. P. Mahadevan (Madras), E. R. Curtius (Bonn), Karl Reinhardt (Frankfurt a/Main), Gerardus van det Leeuw (Groningen), Stephen Spender, and Thornton Wilder. The musicians are Dimitri Mitropoulos and the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, Artur Rubinstein (piano), Erica, Morini and Nathan Milstein (violins), Piatigorsky (cello), Dorothy Maynor, Jerome Hines; Herta Glaz, and Mark Harrell (singers). Vronsky and Babin play two ‘pianos. There is a symposium each morning, @ concert in the afternoon, and a lecture at night. In this third and- last week everybody is pretty tired and confused, conscious only of having failed to grasp more than ~ part of what

: has gone on-but pretty happy about it all the same, and confident that it will sort itself out later when there is time to think. It was thought that in Aspen we could concentrate better without city distractions. This afternoon Mitropoulos took his orchestra to task .for superficial playing: "You let the beauty of the scenery distract you from being beautiful within where the music should come from." And indeed most of the visitors have the Rockies to explore for the ‘first time, as well as Goethe. Aspen is 40 miles from the railway, and in the fastest trains Chicago is 24 hours away to the east, Los Angeles and San Francisco as far to the west. This is the log-cabin country of the wild west movies-Red Stallion of the Rockies was filmed recently five miles away. The deep rose-red I had thought

a peculiarity of technicolour photography is the true colour of the Colorado mountains and soil. Against this the wild flowers are massed, mostly vivid blue. Columbine, the State flower of Colorado, grows up to the snow line; blue lupins, pentstemon, giant myosotis, wild aster and Indian paintbrush take charge of the spaces left by firs and aspens, The streams are full of trout, fierce horses can be hired by those who dare, and for the reflective there is beaver-watching. At the top of the valley the motor road to Santa Fe crosses Independence Pass at a level a few feet higher than the top of Mount Cook, and last week we watched ski races held there in defiance of an unusually hot midsummer, At the foot of the township an amphitheatre has been built for lectures and concerts. It is in a field of lupins cut on two sides by the noisy Roaring Fork creek. The covering is a circus tent of orange and white. Each afternoon the clear day is’ interrupted by a storm. On three successive days the thunder struck at The Sorcerer's Apprentice, the overture to Egmont, Liszt’s Faust symphony, and rather improved them all. On the fourth the storm came lower, silenced a strong performance of Schumann’s third symphony ("Rhenish"), flooded the orchestra off the stage, and imprisoned a delighted audience in the tent for two hours. Central Figure Among porters and waitresses in Aspen are many students who have hitch-hiked from far corners: of the States to hear Dr. Schweitzer, and there ate elderly pilgrims too, Dr. Schweitzer is 74 and this is his first visit to this continent. For the Aspen lectures, the Goethe Bicentennial Foundation has offered him an éndowment for his African hospital, and so far he has not accepted other invitations to lecture, though this week Chicago University has the honour of giving him an honorary degree. (Robert Hutchins, President of the Goethe Foundation, is also President of the University of Chicago.) He appears to) enjoy America much more than he expected to do. The manyfaceted Goethe seemed obscure until Dr, Schweitzer came at the end of the first week of the Festival to present a survey of the subject, assembling the essential detail into logical form. His first lecture was in French, so well interpreted that the interpreter remains anonymous. The second, in German, was interpreted by Thornton Wilder, who put in a great deal of expression. Dr. Schweitzer is a small, quiet man who seems to dwarf the people around him. His face and speech and large dark eyes have the humour that is missing from his writings. He refused the protection and seclusion offered him and made himself accessible to everyone who wished to speak to him; he answered all questions, laughed for hundreds of amateur photographers, autographed books and photographs by the hour. His wife is of the same disposition. "Always he committed: himself to the very limit of his possibilities," as he said of Goethe. The Value of Doubt José Ortega y Gasset, from a very different culture, is more enigmatic, and less approachable. A small, tough man,

he has a belligerent faith in the individual and in the value of doubt. "European civilisation has profound doubts about itself. Well and good! I do not recollect that any civilisation. ever perished from an attack of doubt. ... The sensation of shipwreck is a great stimulation to man. On feeling that he is being submerged, his deepest energies react, his arms ‘strike frantically in the effort to rise to the surface. The shipwrecked mariner becomes a swimmer. . . . Life ‘is impossible without illusions. The old experience of Europe has tried them all; all except®one on which it is now about to embark: the illusion of disillusionmenty" Stephen Spender is working on a translation of Goethe’s poems for the complete new edition being assembled, and he has been~asked to do a translation of Faust, of which there are already 49. He gave a gently daring and witty lecture, beautifully spoken, with some modestly profound definitions of English poetry, and comparisons between the dimensions of Faust and Hamlet. Several subsequent speakers have disagreed with him, ‘but as he had stopped short of making final and dogmatic points, in \the baffling way the English have, they have had a hard time of it. Some boys were enjoying the Fourth of July outside the tent, and he professed himself terrified at the sound of gunfire celebrating a victory over the British. The audience gasped with surprise, and several warm-hearted Americans assured me afterwards that "We never think of it that way." Professor Curtius and Dr. Mahadevan had so much to contribute from other ways of thought that we could have settled down happily for weeks of discussion

> with them. Thornton Wilder gave the most moving speech of all, though it is easier to remember what any one of the others actually said. All the lectures and symposia have been recorded for broadcasting to Europe and for immediate sale here, and they will also be printed. ~ Altitude Affects Music The Aspen concerts by Mitropoulos and his Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra are the Jast that will be, heard from this long, alliterative partnership. , He goes next to join Stokowski to see what can be done about the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Antal Dorati, now at Dallas, Texas, will go to Minneapolis, and no doubt graduate from there with first-class honours as Ormandy and Mitropoulos have done. To Mitropoulos music is a function of the whole mind ‘and body; like Beecham, he can make any Mumber of unorthodox gestures without ever appearing irrelevant or ludicrous. He is the most athletic conductor I have seen and he jumps higher than de Sabata. His Petrouchka-like figure of tragi-comedy seems to conjure out the music for his own fantastic dance. In the long programmes with many items outside the usual repertoire he never refers to the score in performance or rehearsal. He holds to a belief, pretty well outworn elsewhere, that the movements of a symphony follow each other logically without break in tension; he rehearses these transition passages rigorously. As for turning, the pages, "You must manage," and they do, just as they manage without a break for tuning, coughing and chair-moving. They love his amiable strenuousness, and the result is the most consistently lively playing I have heard. At this altitude the instruments and the windplayers’ lips and lungs behave oddly. Each composer comes out overlaid with a harsh brilliance; which is probably necessary if the music is to make any impression "in this sensational environment. Rehearsals begin at mid-day. If the morning lecture overruns its time, the trumpet will innocently practise his Leonora No. 3 call backstage. The management not unreasonably tried to exclude onlookers from rehearsals, but Mitropoulos likes them there, and students sit next(\to their favourite instruments in the. orchestra and discuss it all with the players. Rehearsals are only one part of the unofficial programme, which is as strenuous and interesting as the official. Visitors from isolated communities value the congruence of people and interests; those from the compartmented life of big cities value the close-up view, the chance to see the wheels go round. Students who want to follow up a particular line of thought take their specialist off to the Roaring Fork cafe where good conversation grows easily-Stephen Spender to read his poems, Thornton Wilder to talk of James Joyce and’ Kafka, Professor Curtius to discourse on modern German poetry. Or they find the musicians in the hotel lounge ready to clown publicly to their questions. Ubiquitous Photographers Nothing is’ private. In sinewy athleticism the camera-men are close runnersup to’ Mitropoulos.and the chipmunks; they crawl out from under pianos and

cafe tables, climb the tent-poles and give chase in motor-cars. A Viennese from another city brought in a fine little collection of books by Schweitzer and Goethe, and set them up in the window of the hardware store among the rakes, hoes, gumboots, harness and kettles. I went in and laid hands on a copy of Faust which I have not read. A car drove up, a man jumped out setting up equipment and calling, ."Hold it!" The picture will be used by the State Department in Europe, though I do not know what it is meant to prove. We'll never see the bulk of these fascinating pictures, but we enjoy reading the national journals now pouring in, especially) when they anticipate the event, or call us an "Arty stampede on tough old mining town." Sobér, oldfashioned journalism is practised by the three-sheet, Aspen Times, which prints itself each Thursday in a shed, and ab- . sorbs the Aspen press conferences and interviews into its traditional format. In February, 1950, Aspen will hold a World Ski Championship, and in July it will probably honour the bicentennial of the death of J. S. Bach. This first festival is exploratory, and successful mainly because the diverse people who have come from ali over for many different reasons are excellent mixers. They introduce themselves quickly, giving Christian name, plate of residence, occupation and interests. Talk moves into essentials at once, They are all specially kindly to New Zealand, and have enough energy left from Goethe

to bombard me with, difficult and wellinformed questions about Social Security legislation and the Maoris. One teacher looked me up because he had seen a recent issue of Kiwi and wanted to know if our student publications were’ always as good. Many teachers and students want to visit New Zealand and would welcome an exchange system. Underneath all this we keep hoping that no harm will’ come to Aspen itself. When I came before the Festival, working dogs were taking a trusting siesta in the ‘middle of dusty streets. Motorists have been courteous and none of them have been killed, but they have retreated, and so have a few old-timers who have. bought themselves shacks in ghost villages up the valleys to retire to during invasions. City capital has brought the Festival here, and city visitors do not mean to destroy the retreat they love and need. The greatest security is the pride and generosity of the Aspen born. They turn out of their best rooms for us, share their home life, cook for us night and day and refuse to profiteer. Theirs is the unsparing immediate hospitality of isolated, hardworking people-the kind we know in the mining towns of our own western mountains. The wooden houses of Aspen, the decaying sheds, and the strong, hopeful ramshackle atmosphere are themselves so reminiscent, that I am often glad of the Stars and Stripes lining Main Street to remind me that I am ipa country ‘where the traffic comes in on the wrong side,