MUSICAL THIEVES

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 124, 21 November 1931, Page 22

MUSICAL THIEVES

There is no copyright in performance:. You may get your ideas from Kreisler, you may form your stylo on his, and you may (if you can) expound the Beethoven Concerto with all his turns of expression. If you arc completely successful people will say, "How remarkably like Kreisler!" and this will be intended as a compliment, writes Harry Farjcon, in the "Daily Telegraph."

Should you, on the other hand, be a composer and responsible for tbe work itself, and should your audience exclaim, "How remarkably like tile Beethoven Concerto!" it will not be a compliment. The law even will have a look in—or would do so bad not the copyright expired.

Whence the difference? In the first place I should say that it is due to elusiveness. One cannot catch what slips through the fingers of the analytical brain. No; a criminal must be solid. His sin, a spiritual failing, is not recognised as sin until it is materially graspable. The written manuscript does the trick by reducing thought to a direct formula which can be exactly copied.

In expounding there is always possible the fluidity of the moment; in setting down conceptions this fluidity is resigned for the sake of permanence. To catch the composer on the wing you must hear him improvise. Then his music will be the outcome of the flying moment (backed, of course, by tho experience of past pedestrian hours). It will be the outcome of tho moment, of himself, of you,: of tho instrument he is using; the very tone-qualities will spring from the same source.

I have heard special tone effects during an improvisation which I have never come across in a prepared performance: effects that came into being as part of the music and not as an after-thought skilfully added. Apart from improvisation, however, the composer must stereotype his thought before it can reach the public. One copy of a sonata is,exactly like another copy of. the same sonata. One performance cannot be exactly the same as another performance.

Such differences between two per

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formnuees fall into three categories: the involuntary, the iwilational, the creative. Of the quaiilies that produce these differences only those appertaining to the last-named are valuable, [nvoluntary effects—playing one note a little louder than was intended, or a trifle more staccato —are, of course, undesirable.

So are imitations! effects, but this ovil is insidious, partly because it is so difficult to detect, and partly because to a certain extent it is a necessity of education: like much in education, a pro}} to bo eventually discarded. So long as a pupil is plagiarising his professor he remains a pupil, and the direct imitation of an idol leaves one nothing but an idolater. But the pupil may pass current as a master and tbe idolater as a god with those so avid or so uncritical that they are ready to accept the second-best.

. The great creative artists themselves fall into two categories: those who find themselves in finding the composer, and those who in some degree lose the composer in 'finding themselves. Into the merits of these two parties I will not hero enter. The subject is much discussed. I will only affirm that there are creative performers in both camps; that Joachim was creative when his playing was complementary to Brahms's work, even as wa3 Liszt when adding something to Chopin's.

All the greater, and some of the lesser performing artists have these springs within them, and it is the highest duty of every interpreter to discover his ,own and, when discovered, to uncover them. They may be so easily clogged, through tho facile complacency ' with which is regarded the lack of fresh idea in performance.

By "fresh idea" I do not mean "new ideas," but something more fundamental than the points in a carefully-thought-out reading, though these may be original, too. But the massive authority of a Sehnabel, tho translucence of a Gieseking, the lyrical skylark quality of a Smetorlin, the delicate gravity of a Myra He3s, and, above all, the intense spiritual fire of a Paderewski—these are all living forces.