NEWS AND OPINIONS

Evening Star, Issue 22099, 20 April 1935, Page 2

NEWS AND OPINIONS

CHANGING VOICES. The voice of Europe as exemplified in the singer of to-day is not the voice as heard 40 ,or 50 years ago. That is the opinion of Sir Thomas Beecham. There has been a great change m the sound of the human voice. Sir Thomas is anxious, therefore, that there should be preserved records of the musical performances of to-day. He was speaking in. commendation ot some of. the latest records made by, the Columbia Gramophone Company, given ; at the Savoy. By an improved process these records were taken at the Leeds festival, and it is claimed for them that they achieve a faithfulness of reproduction that has not hitherto been reached. He specially stressed the balance of sound attained. Up to, about the year 1900 there was, said Sir Thomas, an absence of any record of how music sounded. What would we not give to have a record of ‘ Don Giovanni,’ conducted by Mozart? We shall never know how the great artists of the past performed, but there is no longer any excuse for not letting the world know how living executants perform. THE MOST POPULAR ANIMAL. A child jury has just voted Anna Sewell’s famous horse, Black Beauty, the most popular animal in fiction, says the London ‘ Evening Standard. The jury was impannelled by the proprietors of the ‘ Everyman Library.’ Children under 12, between 12 and 14, and between 14 and 16 were asked to vote on their six favourite animals in the ; library’s fiction section. Black Beauty was first and Carroll’s White Rabbit second in all classes. The March Hare. Modestine (from Stevenson’s ‘Travel . with a Donkey ’) and Anderson’s Ugly Duckling were in all three lists. The Cheshire Cat, Crusoe’s Parrot and Rah, of Dr John Brown’s ‘ Rab and His Friends,’ each appear in one of the lists. THE JUBILEE BALL. Preparations are already well advanced for the jubilee ball which the London City Corporation are giving at Guildhall on May 22. By tradition, the city spares no expense to make such celebrations worthy of the occasion. The, most costly city festivities of recent times were those in celebration of King Edward’s coronation, in 1902, on which £24,000 was spent, says ' the ‘ Dailv Telegraph.’ Other examples of the city’s outlay on entertainment are £ Visit of Sultan of Turkey, 1867 22.000 Shah of Persia, 1873 14,000 Tsar of Russia, 1874 ... .12,000 Prince of Wales on his return from India, 1874 22,000 Oueen Victoria’s Jubilee, 1887 6,000 Diamond Jubilee, 1897 ... ... 8,500 The last comparable occasion was the celebration of King George’s coronation in 1911, when the city spent £17,000 on entertaining. MURDER STORIES. One of the accounts of the life of Ml J. S. Fietcher, who died recently, says that “ in writing his stories sometimes he did not know himself who the murderer was until nearly at the end of the book.” If the assertion be true the method seems almost unfair to the reader, comments the ‘ Manchester ■ Guardian.' How- could he be .expected 4 to “spot the “winner;” iii > advance if 1 the author himself during most of the - time of writing ha« not ifc|de up, his y mind on the matter? method might also be rather, awkward for- a i thoroughly conscientious novelist, s Suppose he came,to the. conclusion that ■ he could not really fasten the crime upon anybody—in other words, had achieved a mystery : so profound that, he could not fathom it himself? The ■ only thing to do would bo to send the typescript to Scotland Yard and ask the C.I.D. to have a-go at a problem ; that was too much for its creator. This is not the only occasion on which au thors’ reported , methods have seemed •unexpectedly casual to the wider toub-, lie. It has been said that George Sand used to ‘ write so rapidly and with such : little effort that, some years after it was written, she could, read one of her own novels with genuine interest and surprise in order to find out what happened in the course of it. TURKISH ELECTIONS. Turkey recently had elections on a reformed basis. About a month ago second degree electors were chosen, and now have themselves gone to the polls to decide on 399 deputies for the new Grand National Assembly. The number of deputies is an increase of 82 on that in the last House, a seat having been allotted to each 40,000 instead of each 60,000 inhabitants. A still more liberal spirit, however, is shown by the welcome given to women and nonMoslem members. Of 17 women deputies one is a physician, 10 are teachers, four are municipal councillors, and two email fanners. Ope was educated at Bedford College, and two at the American Women’s College. Incidentally, the president of the assembly solved one ticklish point of etiquette for woman deputies by announcing that they would appear in the House without hats. The hon-Moslera Turks include a Jewish physician, a Greek . throat specialist of European repute, an Armenian hanker, and a lawyer who ■tyles himself an Orthodox Turk. AN ORGANIST’S REWARD. The city organist, Mr Ernest Truman, is about to retire (says the Syd ney correspondent of the Melbourne Age ’). He has been playing tunes on the great organ, at the Town Hall for 25 years. According to a statistician, ho has given 3,000 recitals played 10,000 compositions, by 1,000 composers —including some of his own. No one has suggested how he should be allowed to depart, but he might at least

be permitted to have a swan song, a sort of marathon, with a recital in the morning, one in the afternoon, and another at night, with tickets sold at a shilling each, and a minimum of 2,000 at each recital, the whole of the proceeds to be handed to him. This unobtrustive musician, who has done so much to tune the ear of the people of Sydney into good music, is worthy of a good send-off. The matter of appointing another organist has not come up for discussion yet, but it will probably be left for the next council, as the present council has no ear for music, and the man that has no music in his soul should read what Shakespeare says about him.

THE REAL ROBINSON CRUSOE. Robinson Crusoe is a picturesque figure in fiction, but it would appear that in real life lie was a distinctly unamiahle person. The man who inspired Defoe to write the immortal tale was, says the ‘ Weekly Scotsman,’ born in Largo in 1676. From all accounts he was a bold, fiery young man. In the minutes of the kirk session it is recorded that Alex. Selkirk was cited to attend for disorderly behaviour in the kirk, but that in the interval he had run off to sea. A later entry in the same minutes tells how young Selkirk lost his temper when his broher played a practical joke on him by giving hint salt water to drink. He set on ’ his brother and his father, and the pair were rescued only in the nick of time by the intervention of the former’s wife. At the age of thirty-six Alexander engaged as sailing master on board the Cinque Ports bound for the South Seas, but he quarrelled with the captain, and he was set ashore on the uninhabited island of Juan Fernandez, where he remained in entire solitude for four years and four months. When he returned to England he told his tale to Defoe, who wrote from it the immortal story of the castaway, Robinson Crusoe. Selkirk spent a short period at Largo after his return, but he found life so irksome that he went off and lii'ed by hjmself in a solitary part of the countryside until ho died in 1728. For such an individual isolation on a lonely _ island would seem to have been pre-eminently suitable.

THE LOSS OF THE MACON. The Judge Advocate of the Naval Board of Inquiry at San Francisco, which investigated the accident to the airship Macon, said 1 in summing up the evidence that the accident was due to a fault in design. It appcared that a sudden pressure of wind, striking the after part of the airship’s upper fin, put stress on the forward part and on four bolts at the base of one of the frames. The pressure was transmitted to the outer ring, and from there to the diagonal. girders. One or more of the girders gave way and punctured gas cells, allowing the tail of the airship to go unsupported, so_ that it dropped into the sea.— ‘ The Times.’

STRANGE GERMAN MUSEUMS. Germany may well claim to possess some of tne most original museums in existence. Near the Anhalt Station in Berlin, for instance, there is a Smugglers’ Museum, which gives a rare insight into the ingenious methods of international smugglers. Also in the Gorman capital, in the High School ior Music. Hardenbergstrasse, js a unique collection of historic musical instruments. One may play on the piano on which Mozart composed; and there is a trumpet from Nuremberg dating back to 1523. • ‘ Cassel lias a special exhibition of carpets of various historical periods; Trier a museum of German wiue since Rqmnn times; Aachen what is’ probably the largest newspaper cuttings library in the world, containing over 10,000 cuttings,- including cuttings from a Spiritualist paper in which white letters are printed on a black background. The largest bird collection in Germany is at Halbferstadt, in the Harz district, where are to be found over 13,000 different foreign birds and 400 German varieties. Munich has a record of recent world history, dating back to the outbreak of the World War in 1914. ' This contains placards, leaflets, and all types of newspaper and propaganda material used in the different countries. DISILLUSIONED. Mr William Henry Chamberlain has written a new book, ‘ Russia’s Iron Age.’ ‘The Times’ reviewer writes: ‘‘Air Chamberlain, is a journalist who has lived in Russia since 1922, travelled there extensively and written a good book on Soviet Russia he speaks the Russian language. He has now left the country and in this new volume he carries on the story through the time of the Five-Year Plans, which he calls Russia’s Iron Age. .. . The author has greatly changed in his attitude towards the Soviet system since 1922, when he went to Russia. Ho was then ‘ more than friendly ’ towards it, he was ‘enthusiastic’ about it; and he looks back now with some amusement to the ‘ rhetorical articles in praise of the Bolshevik Revolution ’ which he then published. They probably gained him some of the privileges of which he has made good use. Now his enthusiasm has all departed, though ho has not completed the ‘ psychological somersault ’ into the opposite extreme, as some of his friends have._. . . There is the ‘ permanent and odious system of terrorism and espionage,’ the decimation of the intelligentsia, and the subjection of the peasantry to wholesale deportations and to a ‘ military feudal exploitation ’ that reached its ‘ terrible and inevitable climax in the great famine of 1932-33,’ His personal belief is that the whole thing is ‘ an example of historical tragedy of the deepest and truest type, a tragedy of cruelty, of the crushing out of innumerable individual lives, not from sheer wanton selfishness, but from perverted fanatical idealism.’ He thinks that change will come about gradually through a growing disbelief in the Marxian formulas,”