THE PUBLIC MIND: A VERY GOOD WEEKEND IN CAPE GIRARDEAU: VIOLINS, OPERETTAS HELP MELT THE CENTURIES

To the Editor:

Although the logical analyst has trouble with art and music, especially in an election year when school budgets are being cut, we were delighted with Judy Williams' production at Central High of Gilbert and Sullivan's "Pirates of Penzance." The meat-and-potatoes man asks, "Yes, but what good is it, really?" and suggests by his question that no answer we could give would please him. Some of the better things seem created for pleasure alone. That good life, that "kindlier and gentler nation," may be achieved in part by such events as two we attended this weekend.

Art is long and humbles us and ties us to the past. Before the long-playing record and fine music stations, symphonies were for the wealthy alone. In college I rigged up an LP system in our farm home, and my parents heard for the first time the symphonies of Beethoven, Columbia recordings in blue jackets of the 3rd, 5th, and 6th. I could not afford the 9th, and it was not yet as popular as it has become recently. I also bought dad several biographies of Beethoven. Dad loved biographies and I recall that he said to himself, "To think that my father and Beethoven were living at the same time." Samuel Johnson believed that art which had lasted a century had become classic and was destined not to die. Beethoven's music (Johnson and Beethoven were also contemporaries) and now Gilbert and Sullivan meet that test.

Those operettas are a most splendid marriage of words and music beyond anything that had been before or has come since. They give stature to our native language. Perhaps operas may be translated, but try singing, "I Am The Very Model of a Modern Major General" in German. In their non-litigious age Gilbert went about poking fun at the pomposities, Policemen are serious, but dance so absurdly. The ruthless pirate is overcome with tenderness. The Major General is the very quintessence of one, but is not good at turning out smooth rhymes. He teems with cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse; today's math genius may know more facts, but it is unlikely that they are cheerful ones.

For a century civilized people have chuckled about all of this. The streets of London resounded with folks whistling the airs of Sullivan. We still do. At least, we were doing it when we left the Central High auditorium. Cape and London are not so far apart. And today I got out my tattered G and S collection, ran through a few tunes, and remembered how my nieces and others would gather about the piano on Sunday afternoons and we all learned Gilbert and Sullivan. I hope they are teaching their kids the same tunes today.

People are out of work. There is no cure for AIDS. School boards are making agonized cuts. But none of these problems will be solved by ousting Gilbert and Sullivan and their entourage. And a great deal will be lost. One can guess that when the students involved in this production are reflecting in their old age, they will recall that production as one of their better times.

Art makes our shaky lives more firm. Tarina Kang Sunday afternoon played a recital which must certainly have been one of the most memorable musical events in a community long noted for music. She began with Beethoven sonata, and as I listened, it seemed that I could hear the composer muttering and I felt his inspiration, as if the two centuries between us had melted away. Modern analysis delights in underlining his personal quirks, but it is his art which allows him with Tarina's coaxing, to live today, not in Vienna alone but in Cape Girardeau as well. A very good weekend.

Peter Hilty

Cape Girardeau