The beginnings and development of a New Zealand music: The life ...

1947 he collaborated with director Sam Williams on The Infernal Machine
(Jean Cocteau's version of Oedipus Rex), staged at the Wellington
Polytechnic Hall.
In 1949 he wrote for the play The Trojan Women,
directed by Maria Dronke and produced at the Wellington Repertory Theatre.
The following year he worked again with Maria Dronke, scoring a string
quartet accompaniment for a reading by Dronke of Phillips and Schimanski's
1948 translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's Die Weise vom Leben und Tod des
Cornetts Cristoph Rilke. The reading took place in the Helen Hitchings
Gallery, Wellington, on 12 October 1950, with the music performed by the
A 1 ex L1n . d' say Str1ng Quartet. 12
102
In 1952, Lilburn wrote the music for another poetry reading, this
time of New Zealand verse. This reading was held at the Auckland
University College on 9 August and featured the poets A.R.D. Fairburn,
K. Sinclair, M.K. Joseph, JamesK. Baxter, Kendrick Smithyman and
R.A.K. Mason.
Lilburn's music was scored for violin and piano and
comprised an Introduction, several Interludes and a Coda. 13
1952 was also the year that Lilburn first collaborated with
Wellington theatre director Richard Campion.
of Hamlet, staged by the Wellington Repertory Society.
This was on a production
In 1953, Richard Camp,ion and his wife Edith established the New
Zealand Players theatre group. This professional company's first play -
The Young Elizabeth - was extensively advertised as using solely New
Zealand talent. Lilburn corrected the Campions, by pointing out the
music for The Young Elizabeth had been written by an English musician,
. 14
Anthony Hopkins. The result was that the second production of the
New Zealand Players - Dandy Dick, by Pinero, (opened 13 May 1953) - had
the incidental music especially composed by Lilburn.
Lilburn's score:
" the charming Offenbach pastiche he wrote
••• and for which, in Wellington and Auckland,
I was the suffering pianist. As an entr'acte
I had to play a galop so fast that it left me
limp: Douglas attended··severalperformances
and after one of them, came to me with that
compassionate twinkle which all his friends
will recognize and murmured "I should be shot
for writing that-illS
Bruce Mason recalls
12 Programme to the reading.
13 Manuscript score, housed at Alexander TurnbulLLibrary.
14 Scott papers.
IS Br.uce Mason, Music on the air. New Zealand Listener 29 October
1965:22.