"ACT OF VANDALISM"

Radio Record, Volume VIII, Issue 33, 22 February 1935, Page 5

"ACT OF VANDALISM"

CORRESPONDENT complained recently ‘in a Wellington newspaper of the cutting of an opera broadcast from 2YA (actually the whole of the recorded opera was broadcast and whatever cutting there was was carried out in London). But far more serious are the charges levelled by Sir Thomas Beecham against the British Broadcasting Corporation. After listening to the broadcast of a "potted" version of Humperdinck’s "Hansel and Gretel," Sir Thomas wrote to the "Daily Telegraph," describing this abridgment-in which the gaps in the music were filled by an announcer’s com-mentary-as an "unprecedented act of vandalism ’"’ He also thought that the composer knew better cuan Mr. Derek McCulloch, the author of the version, and described the whole production as the "most ineffable ‘piece of impudence ever perpetrated." While one can perhaps sympathise with musical purists of Sir Thomas Beecham’s standing, it is well to bear in mind that the question of broadcast opera is a large one, but its solution can only be postponed by the efforts of those persons who, themselves steeped in the ninutiae of opera, are unwilling to allow others to approach it by any methods but their own. To enable the widest possible public to enjoy the glorious music of opera seems to us a most worthy aim. As the London "Radio Times" rightly points out "‘if it is permissible to build a whole concert of -individual items from, for instance, Wagner’s operas (as is done regularly at the Promenade concerts), why is it vandalism to link them up with narrative?"