Music from Literature
ONDAY’S talk by John Longmire (from 1YC) served as an easy and interesting introduction to the work of Gerald Finzi, and gave us an opportunity to hear once more that most satisfying work, the Dies Natalis. There is something inevitably right in Finzi’s selection of his texts from Traherne, and he sustains, with an evident sympathy, their pure and tranquil rapture, The five Shakespearian songs which followed have the same rightness on a smaller scale, but the Traherne settings are something more, the result perhaps of a fortunate accident, a harmony of two imaginations. Later the same evening we heard Vaughan Williams’s Job. This was relevant in more ways than one, for Finzi is to some extent indebted to Vaughan Williams. Both works are happy examples of literary inspiration in music, and both have a strong but indefinable "English" character, The difference between them lies in the fact that Dies Natalis is a_ self-sufficient work, whereas Job, for perfectly good reasons, is not. It ts a virtue in ballet that it should not be overwhelmed by its own music; and Job,’ in spite of its manifest appropriateness, is incomplete without the settings designed after Blake, and the choreography of Ninette de Valois. and Helpmann’s superb
Satan.
M.K.
J.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19531009.2.21.2
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 743, 9 October 1953, Page 10
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211Music from Literature New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 743, 9 October 1953, Page 10
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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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