Listening to Schonberg

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 759, 5 February 1954, Page 10

Listening to Schonberg

AM allergic to aimost all compositions which, consist of declamations above, through or under music, unless, like the original Sitwell-Walton Facade, they are not meant to be taken seri-

ously. Largely because of this, Schonberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, which, because of its tragic theme, should have been very moving, seemed to me instead to be comic. I find it difficult to accept as serious music, even from a distinguished composer like Schonberg, a piece in which a solemn voice halfchants, half-wails through a clash of weird tonalities. It called up visions of earnest little groups of "experimentalists’ reciting Sanskrit poems -while other people beat on gongs, banged blocks of wood together and fingered half-tone pianos, and of al] other kinds of "advanced" music which used to be modislf in those dear’ mad days before the war. All the Philistine in me was brought to the surface by this composition. But any doubts I might have had about my own impressions were removed when one of my sons who had dimly heard the work from his bedroom uttered the perfect critical comment by asking innocently if it were a new Danny Kaye! '