The dawn of modernism?

I was thinking about what I’d missed in 2013. Lots of things, for sure. But, reading the perceptive blogpost From the Choirboy Motel on the Young Vic’s production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House* made me ache with regret that I’d not taken the trouble to go and see it.

It made me think of the impact that the play had in Melbourne when it first opened at the Princess Theatre in 1889. Perhaps expecting the usual sort of drawing room comedy, there were rowdy scenes following the première. The critics were universal in their condemnation of the supposed moral degeneracy of the drama. “Excessively didactic,” noted The Argus in Melbourne, “… insufficiently dramatic… the character of Nora… unnatural,” and so on.

The play had originally opened in Norway ten years earlier, the first English translation being commissioned from William Archer by Janet Achurch** and husband Charles Charrington, who took the lead roles, initially in London, then in Australia and New Zealand. It caused ructions wherever they took it.

Was this play the dawn of modernism?

Curiously, another less controversial play taken on the Australasian tour by the Charringtons was an adaptation of a Rider Haggard story entitled Devil’s Carefoot by the upcoming (now substantially forgotten) Australian playwright, Haddon Chambers.

*http://choirboymotel.com/2013/08/18/from-a-dolls-house-to-parliament/ 
**Janet Achurch photographed by H Walter Barnett (probably in Sydney), 1889  

Alfred Hill: Australasia’s finest composer?

How exciting it must have been for the sixteen year-old Australasian, Alfred Hill, to arrive in Leipzig to study violin and composition in 1887, able to observe at close quarters most of the greatest musicians and composers of that time – Brahms, Joachim, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Sarasate, Bruch and Ysaÿe among them ‒ and within two years to be inducted into the legendary Gewandhaus orchestra.

Born in Melbourne in 1869, he was raised in Wellington, where he became something of a musical prodigy before going on to Leipzig to study at the Conservatorium. The training he received there was extremely thorough, but already Leipzig was felt by many to be living in the past, under the shadow of Mendelssohn and Schumann.

So how sad, later in life, to be deemed out-of-date and consequently ignored in one’s own lifetime.

Over the course of a long life, lived primarily in Sydney, Alfred Hill composed constantly, and, although he experimentally incorporated both Maori and Aboriginal motifs in his work, he never escaped from the late Romantic style he acquired in Leipzig. In the meantime, from the early years of the twentieth century, the musical world had become preoccupied with “modernism” – Stravinsky, Bartok, Debussy, Schoenberg and the rest.

The consequence is that the bulk of Hill’s music languishes in various libraries in Australia and New Zealand, unperformed and unknown.

So kudos to Naxos and to the Dominion Quartet for recording all of Alfred Hill’s fine series of quartets for the first time. And to the DQ’s viola-player, Donald Maurice, for editing and publishing Hill’s fascinating Leipzig diary.

But there’s so much more to discover.