Songs of ALL TIME

Radio Record, Volume XII, Issue 34, 3 February 1939, Page 9

Songs of ALL TIME

[HE ereative faculty in music ig a very delicate quality, and needs to be understood. To overtax it will sometimes extinguish it for ever. Artistic ideas come at all hours and to record them immediately is not only to seeure to oneself a stock-in-trade to which recourse may be had when the mind has been overworked and ideas will not come, but may prevent the loss, perhaps for ever, of some snatch of melody which will live for ages. This was a great custom with Schubert, who was always at work or ready for work. Indeed, he always wore his spectacles in the night to be ready to compose direetly ‘he woke in the morning, if se moved. This liability to compose on the most unexpected occasions is shown in the following: Scene: A higgledy-piggledy little Viennese cafe known as the "Biersack"; very rowdy, on a Sunday afternoon. . Schubert, with several friends, was strolling along through Wahring, and saw his friend Tieze sitting at a table in the garden of the cafe. The whole party determined on @ halt in their journey. Tieze had a book lying open before him. His Melody Comes It is a copy of Shakespearean Plays translated into German that very year, the work in which he had himself helped. Schubert, looking over Tieze’s shoulder, sees the book, picks it up and begins to read. ' *¥ have a pretty melody in my head fo.. these lines," he _ says, pointing to the immortal verse in "Oymbeline," Shakespeare’s play on that mythical British king. Schuhert’s friend, Doppler, drew some staves on the back of a menu, and in the midst of a genuine Sunday hubbub, with fiddiers, skittie-players, and waiters running about in different directions with orders, Schue bert wrote a masterpiece of song -"‘Hark! Hark! the Lark." "Hark! Hark! the Lark" appealead to Schubert in a fiash. He saw in imagination the lover standing before his lady’s window and heard him cali to her in his love serenade to awake and behold the beauties of the sunrise, Schubert sensed the freshness of a morning in springtime, its blossoming trees, its twittering birds. Even the "chaliced flowers" he knew to be the "calices" or chalices, with their "cups" filled with dew which the morning dries up. He also knew that the "Marybuds" or marigolds, closed themselves up at sunset, to open again with the morning sun. All these things Schubert put into his bright and graceful melody, with its spirited and gay rhythm. Hark! hark the lari at Heaven's gate sings, And Phoebus ‘gins to rise, His steeds to water at those springs On chaliced flowers that lies; And winking Mary-buds begin To ope their golden eyes: With everything that pretty is, My lady sweet, arise; Arise, arise! My tady sweet, arise! Schubert’s "Hark! hark! the Lark" will be sung by Richard Tauber, tenor, at 3YA on Friday, February 10.