The Lost Axlepin

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 935, 12 July 1957, Page 30

The Lost Axlepin

| Eos JANACEK’S Diary of a Man Who Vanished is one of those works for whose rare performance one must be grateful, and having heard it finely performed last week by Richard Lewis, Mona Ross, three anonymous ladies and Maurice Till, piano, one’s gratitude should mount and mount. But I cannot say that gratitude was uppermost in me when the work ended with a tenor salvo and the solemn plunking of tonic chords in various inversions: bafflement would be nearer. No doubt, in its original tongue, the Diary has considerable earthy force; in English, fitted arbitrarily, as all translated . libretti must be, to the music, the text has a repellant, glutinous coyness, that I can liken only to George Borrow strained through Thomas Hardy. Further, the text is studded with unfortunate imagery that offers splendid opportunities to those of a bawdy or irreverent turn of mind. And finally, the ploughboy and his tawny Gypsy bride ("God all powerful, God eternal, why create the gypsy race?" she might well ask, after this) are such mooning asses that I could not treat their very commonplace situation with any respect whatever. With these feelings in mind, it would be unwise (continued on next page)

to say much about the music, which seemed to progress as an endless parlando, fitfully relieved by a folksy Czech tune, or a passage of Schubertian harmony. For me, the work said nothing: was nothing. I shall not run a mile to hear it again.