SPORT AND MUSIC

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 121, 28 November 1928, Page 7

SPORT AND MUSIC

CAUSTIC COMMENT Tho English, it is often remarked, arc as a nation too much occupied with sport to he interested in music. Sometimes the two pastimes are joined, Ernest Newman remarked recently in a rueful article for the London "Sunday Times." "We think it finer to do something badly with the odds against us than to do the same thing well after proper training," wrote Mr. Newman. A fiddler who murders the Saint-Saons concerto outside' the Wigmolian Hall is surer of a front page paragraph than a Kochanski playing Szymanowski inside. "If a tenor wants the popular Press to ravo over him, let him-'sing Tristan without ever having seen the opera, and, if possible, without rehearsal. Let Sir Thomas Beecham produce a Mozart opera at great expense and after years of study, and we are exceedingly critical of him; but let someone put on Mozart in a style that.has tho wellmoaning amateur written all over it, with singers who cannot sing, actors who cannot, act, and an orchestra that cannot play, and we arc delighted. "For hero we Teeoguiso spirit that has made England great, tho spirit that makes the spectators at a boxing contest chuck coppers into the ring for a game loser. It is all very.admirable in its way, this regarding of music as a game rather than as a serious busjness; but it is perhaps hardly the way to make the greatest imaginable success of art." This quirk in nature is better to be described as human than as merely English, comments the "San Francisco Chronicle." It. exemplifies the delicate balance of an audience's personal atti. tude toward performers. On the ono side is a willingness to yield, on the other an egotistic impulse to oppose. In the hero worship of a great artist, for example, the surrender is complete, even hysterical. On tho other hand, the crowd sometimes perversely pecks at strength. Remember the instance of Aristides, tho Just, whose good reputation became tiresome to his admirers. There is also a typical mass sympathy going out to the under dog. Just as it can glory vicariously in. the strength of genius, an audience can feel intimately the handicaps of admitted weakness. No, the English have no monopoly of human inconsistency.