Friday, July 16, 2010

A Star no longer Shines








A star no longer shines in the night,
today, the music is getting dark…
Mackerras’ baton no longer fights:
a muted voice from the australian lark.

Bohemians have a new mourning day,
Janácek champion concludes his trail…
Britten’s disciple no longer plays,
even the vixen wears the black veil.

A star no longer shines in our days…
another book is finished and locked,
his legacy will remain amaze…
will remain impressive and evoked.

In Memoriam, Sir Charles Mackerras (14JUL10)



What a revelation this performance was to me,
here was a composer -Janácek- whose very name I hardly knew,
who had been dead 20 years, writing an opera
in an entirely different idiom from anything I had ever known,
who used the human voice and the inflections of his
strange-sounding language in an absolutely original way,
and whose instrumentation and harmony produced colors and sounds
unlike anything I had heard before.

Sir Charles Mackerras
Praga, 1947


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