Beethoven in the Bush

The gimcrack stage tilted tipsily toward the footlights, and gusts of damp winter air surged from the wings. The piano plunked like a loosely strung mandolin. But the audience listened to the big, barrel-chested baritone with the rapt concentration of buffs at the Metropolitan Opera. They stomped lusty approval of arias from Tannhaeuser and The Barber of Seville, art songs by Delibes and Debussy, lieder by Karl Loewe and Schubert.

The artist was U.S. Negro Baritone William Warfield. The place was the rough-hewn farming community of Warwick (pop. 10,000) in the Australian bush.

Warfield went to Warwick at the invitation of the Australian Broadcasting Commission, which since the war has underwritten a mammoth musical program in the sparsely settled bush areas. The country currently has six ABC symphony orchestras. Every year they travel thousands of miles by train, bus, and paddle steamer to play in some 80 of the rachitic towns along the coasts and in the Australian outback. In addition, the Broadcasting Commission has sponsored bush tours by such world-famed soloists as Violinist Isaac Stern and Pianist Eugene Istomin.

The trials of playing the bush are formidable. The Queensland Symphony Orchestra, for instance, travels 3,500 miles a year in four wooden railroad sleeping cars, carrying with it such essentials as stage curtains, lights, primus stoves and portable iceboxes. In the town of Innisfail, instruments too big to go up the hilltop concert hall's narrow stairway were hoisted 80 ft. by steel cables. At Townsville the musicians heard an ominous crackling sound, scrambled offstage seconds before a 30-ft. beam crashed down on their music stands and chairs.

"Ten years ago," recalls Queensland Symphony Conductor Rudolf Pekarek, "you had to beg people to come to concerts. Now they're always packed." Reason is that the Broadcasting Commission has trumpeted the cultural values of good music as a measure of a town's civic taste. In towns whose chief diversion formerly was hunting kangaroos and rabbits, overflow crowds climb nearby trees to listen through the open windows. Occasionally, aborigines show up and solemnly swig plonk (Australian slang for wine).

The musical sophistication of such bush audiences happily surprises visiting artists. Baritone Warfield, in towns whose saloon signs and bat-winged doors reminded him of "something out of a western movie," by request scheduled programs usually reserved for "highbrow cities like New York." In Armidale (pop. 11,000), he struck up a debate with a brawny university football player. Subject: Gabriel Faure's musical setting of Paul Verlaine's poem La Bonne Chanson.

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