ENGLAND IS MUSICAL TOO

Waipawa Mail, Volume XXXVII, Issue 8363, 30 July 1920, Page 1 (Supplement)

ENGLAND IS MUSICAL TOO

(By Richard Capell.)

The hint one would offer to the wondrous galaxy of musicians who come from the ends of the earth to shine in the London season is—that they remember we too are a community with a musical life and traditions of our own; and that they abjure that attitude, common in the brilliant bygone London seasons, of the musicians as circus performer, out to amaze a bench of yokels. Supposing you are a brilliant musician of some sort just come from (say) Patagonia to win the suffrages of Paris. Then, before or after displaying your own talents or*your sample of native Patagonian wares, you do not fail to acknowledge somehow the existence of French art. French music of some sort will figure on your programme—Politesse oblige. It is not an empty form, for you thereby show your sense in allowing that, with all your pride in Patagonianism, in France, too, work has been achieved worthy of winning your attention. You make the graceful suggestion that your French audience may naturally find their compatriot’s art most fitted to their taste. And you thus recognise also that you, the interpreter from overseas, and your audience (being countrymen of a composer you interpret) are both to some degree fellow members in one community of art. In Paris you do not display your music as though it were an activity odd. alien, and as remote from your audience's real minds as pearl fishing. But then you propose to cross the Channel, seeking various words from the most amiable critics that there are in Europe, and also perhaps the pecuniary advantages of filling the Albert Hall with an audience of 10,000? But your tactics will change? Here you will attempt to astonish and to mystify, you will pose as representing an artistic race among an inartistic race whose poor efforts you will ignore as though they were not? You will sing exclusively in Patagonian, since nocuspocus cannot be translated, and anyhow loses its charm is understood? Stranger! the war must have detained you. Your ideas are superannuated. You are some years too late. This musical season will be no doubt as “brilliant” as any in the old days, but the more intelligent foreign musician will perceive a change in the air. He will find national susceptibilities where there were none before the war. and this will set him reflecting how the music of Germany first became consciously national after the Napoleonic wars, and how the date 1870 divides the French music, that conceived itself international from the deliberately national school.

At the moment most people here have no clear estimate of the value of our English composers; at the same time the indifference of even ten years ago has altered, and very soon, indeed, it will be held by everyone as sheer discourtesy on the part of visiting singers, violinists, or conductors to come here and give concerts with never a recognition of the existence of English art. Those who do not know of its existence should become informed before they set sail, for the musical movement in England to-day is in interest and vitally second to none in the world. English music is little known to none abroad, largely because we have acquiesced in our foreign visitors ignoring it. Every really eminent musician in the world must have a London reputation. When in future this is sought, let the candidate, as a point of courtesy at least, never fail to bring to hearing some example of our own art. If that were done, the musical season would achieve something beyond empty brilliance, and incidentally the virtuosos’ concerts—their violin recitals of Bruch’s and Wieniawski's inevitable concertos, and treir eternal hammering at the Beethoven sonatas—would become far less dull.