MUSIC
THE chief musical events of the week have been Slavonic—the complete performance of Smetana's M‘i Vicar under Rafael Kubelik on November 26th and the evening of Szymanowski's music at the Polish Embassy on the 27th. Only two of the six symphonic poems of MO Vlast are regularly played outside Czechoslovakia, and both are nature studies of a quite general kind which need no knowledge of Czech mythology, history or topography in order to appreciate them. Vltava was inspired by the river of Prague, but its growth from an insignificant rivulet to a strong heroic tide applies as well to the Thames or the Rhine (and there are echoes of Melusine, certainly). In the same way Bohemia's woods and meadows are not musically distinguishable from those of any other country. On the other hand Vysehrad and Sarka tell at considerable length stories of purely Czech interest, and the intensity and grandiloquence of Tdbor and Blanik are only justified by historical associations. A very rough approximation would be, say, tone poems on Caerlon, Boadicea, Winchester (a very poor parallel) and Plymouth Hoe.
Now the music of such tone poems must be in itself excellent and virtually independent, as far as the listener is concerned, of its pro- gramme if it is to appeal to anyone outside the country of its origin. Smetana wrote this cycle between 1874-79 at a time of fervid nationalist enthusiasm, when such considerations would have been tantamount to treason to the national cause ; and the result is that to non-Czech audiences these tone poems, with their immensely noisy orchestration and general air of solemn jubilee, seem to be on a scale quite out of proportion to their intrinsic musical interest. The bard's harp in Vyselzrad, the complicated pro- gramme of Sarka and the Hussite chorale in Tdbor and Blanik have no associations to us, who learn their significance five minutes before the concert starts, in a programme-note. Objectively, the musical material is often trivial, and its treatment a parody of Wagnerian orchestration, with perpetually blaring brass, tinkling triangle and clashing cymbal. (It would be fair, perhaps, to remember that Smetana was already threatened with dearness.) MO Vlast in its entirety is a national monument, and purely aesthetic criticism of such works of art misses perhaps as much as half of the artist's conscious aim. After all, does any foreigner wholly understand even Shakespeare's Falstaff, Ibsen's Peer Gynt or Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz?
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Karol Szymanowski died ten years ago, at the age of fifty-four. Listening to his music I could only relate it to Scriabin and Debussy. He was an impressionist by temperament, but, unlike the French, an extremist always (or so it seemed) on the verge of violent out- burst, in love with the highest register of voice and instruments and finding natural expression for his emotions in great complexity and delicacy of texture. In his third piano sonata, played with great skill by Philip Levi, the keyboard technique was obviously related to that of Scriabin's later piano sonatas ; but Scriabin's ecstasy was absent and the style was elaborated to express nothing less. The poems of Julian Tuwim lose almost everything, I imagine, in translation, but Szymanowski's settings of four poems by James Joyce showed that he had a beautifully sensitive perception of even English poetry, and the Tuwim " wordsongs " were therefore in all probability brilliant. Emelie Hooke mastered the enormous diffi- culties of these songs wonderfully well—their quite unpredictable melodic line, their exquisite delicacy and often cruelly high tessitura. The Blech quartet played Szymanowski's second string quartet, which has an opening phrase of quite exceptional beauty, though the rest of the music does not live up to it and often seems, like the piano sonata, to be complex for complexity's sake. Szymanowski is an undoubted master in his own style : but that style—like so many modern styles—is only suited to express sensations and emotions which lie on the very outside edge of the average listener's experience, and for that reason his music will, I think, always be the preserve of the musical connoisseur. MARTIN COOPER.
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