WORDS AFTER MUSIC

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 723, 22 May 1953, Page 12

WORDS AFTER MUSIC

PLEASURES OF MUSIC, ‘an anthology of writing about music and musicians from Cellini to Bernard Shaw, by Jacques Barzun; Michael Joseph. English price, 21/-.

(Reviewed by

Owen

Jensen

WELL-CHOSEN anthology is something more than a mere collection of literary extracts. It is a declaration of the editor’s taste and very probably the exposition of an idea. Jacques "Barzun’s collection of writings about "music and musicians fulfils both these conditions. Mr. Barzun’s taste is for talking about music and his book is presented with the simple and obvious argu‘ment that writing and talking about music has as much to it as the pursuit of the same pastime in literature, art or anything else..In his admirable introduction, "Music and Words," Mr. Barzan -deplores-not before time-the attitude of those who "are so deeply revolted by "nonsense that they deny the possibility of even talking about music; those who claim that music is an ‘experience apart which words can never reach." The fallacy of what is often a form of musical snobbery-this reluctance to admit the validity of discussion about music --is convincingly demonstrated by the delights of the writing included in this anthology. Jacques Barzun’s selection is made with remarkable eclecticism. Fiction, criticism, music and drama, composers and performers, premiéres, the musical life, instruments, fantasies and confessions, letters, maxims and good stories -the whole field of music is drawn upon, but with no evidence of preference or prejudice other than the unifying theme that everything in the book represents the particular writer’s interest in music. Interest may not always, of course, imply enjoyment as, for instance, when Sydney Smith wrote

to Lady Holland politely but firmly refusing an invitation to the opera: "Semiramis would be to me pure misery. I love music very little-I hate acting; I have the worst opinion of Semiramis herself, and the whole thing (I cannot help it) seems so childish and so foolish that I cannot abide it"; or Macaulay who dismissed wild adulation of Paganini with: "This eloquence is quite beyond me." Nor does Mr. Barzun forbear to quote the fancifully inaccurate writer like Dickens who described the ‘cello playing of one of his characters in Dombey and Son as gliding "melodiously into the Harmonious Blacksmith which he played over and over again until his ruddy and _ serene face gleamed like true metal on the anvil of a veritable blacksmith." The book includes some of the best writing about music and musicians, like Stendhal’s __ brilliantly penetrating study

of Rossini, Samuel Butler’s ruminations on Handel, or G. K. Chesterton’s amusing but apt observations on "Music at Meals." No one need have more than an in-telligent-even if uninformed-interest in music to enjoy sampling Pleasures of Music, borrowing, as Jacques Barzun expresses it, "a little of the sacred fire from the spot where it is really burning" and discovering "the cause why music was ordained." And after all, as the inscription on the title reminds us: "Nobody is ever patently right about music."