Musicians, in the esoteric sense of the word, are inclined
to despise the man who regards music as a stimulus to thought and whose pleasure in music depends upon the ideas and associa- tions it evokes. Yet, for very obvious reasons, music-lovers of this type must have derived as great enjoyment from tho quartet playing in the National Gallery last Tuesday as the listener who indulges in purely musical emotions. In the uninspiring surroundings of a concert hall the imaginative listener is forced to transcend his environment. Indeed, if it were the business of such a man to write about music, which Heaven forbid, he would probably express his feelings in some variation of Tennyson's lines
c6 heard Apollo sing,
While Ilion like a mist rose into towers."
At the National Gallery he found his Troy already built, for on every hand some masterpiece of painting tempted his imagina- tion down long vistas of beauty. And musicians pity this man The writer himself must confess that during the playing of Beethoven's F miner Quartet the close proximity of Perugino's Adoration proved irresistible, and he found himself poised for one perilous moment on the wings of colour as well as the wings of song. This accidental fusion of two widely differing arts calls for a new Abt Vogler, who, " out of four sounds and a picture, makes not a fifth sound and a picture, but a star."
The second Quartet played on Tuesday, the Haydn in C major,
was perhaps the happier choice. Haydn wrote music for palaces rather than for concert halls, and this quartet seemed peculiarly suited to the magnificence of the surroundings. The same could, of course, be said of Mozart, and when these musical performances become a regular event, as it is hoped they will before long, it will be interesting to resuscitate the works of some forgotten Court composers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The music that once lived in the palaces of kings might appropriately live again in the palace of the poor scholar. Then we must hear Bach, Purcell (among other works, The Golden Sonata), Rameau, Couperin, Gluck, and a crowd of others. It would be a fascinating task to draw up the programmes for these musical afternoons. There could be harpsichord recitals, madrigal singing, and chamber music for divers combinations of instruments. Debussy's Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp is a good example of an unusual combination of instruments, and modern music should certainly be included in the scheme. The music of Debussy, moreover, has a peculiar affinity with early Italian painting. One thinks of the quattrocento painters—in Debussy there is the same gracious beauty, the same delicate colourings of mother-of-pearl, the same absence of any human element. The possibility of establishing a relationship between certain types of music and certain pictures is full of attraction. In Room XXIV., where we have Crome's .Mousehold Heath and the Poringland Oak, folksong would be inevitable, and what could be more suitable than the fine modern arrangements by Dr. Vaughan Williams and Mr. Gustav Hoist ? In the entrance hall, Uocelle's San .Romano, a magnificent decorative painting for all its violent and over-emphasized perspective, would be an excellent background for Clement Jannequin's amusing Chanson, La Halal& de Marignan, a sixteenth century attempt at musical realism, in which the noise and confusion of battle is imitated with remarkable verve. Whoever has charge of this venture must, before everything else, avoid pretentiousness, for there a danger lies. He must think in terms of the flute rather than in terms of the trombone. The trio, the quartet, and the quintet, vocal and instrumental, would be a safe boundary beyond which it would be dangerous to travel. But these suggestions can be nothing more than a pleasant game. The real work has been done already by the authorities of the National Gallery. On Tuesday the efficient performance by students from the Royal College of Music was but a prelude, let us hop, to many similar pleasures for Londoners in the near future. We have taken another step towards the Golden Age.
C. H.
Previous page
