MY FAIR LADY is a famous musical based on G.B. Shaw’s play PYGMALION which itself is  based on an ancient Greek myth in which a sculptor falls in love with one of his creations.The figure of a beautiful woman in cold marble comes to life,transformed into a warm living human being thru the power of love.

In the play and the musical , Professor Henry Higgins accepts as a dare the task of “educating” a cockney flower girl from Covent Garden , ELiza Doolittle,so that she can be presented to SOCIETY.Eliza has ambitions of her own and is willing to go along with the “experiment”. The professor has much to teach her.There will be the imposition of many rules and regulations- of speech,dress,manners, comportment etc.In the ancient myth , inanimate marble became a living breathing woman.Will Higgins be doing the opposite? In order to “educate” Eliza will he have to ignore her true nature ? Will introduction into SOCIETY be at the expense  of her true nature?

Henry Higgins lives in a bubble of self assessed superiority. Now that he has “improved” Eliza will he give her the same respect he automatically accords someone of his own class ?

What has this to do with the subject of this program which is” When is a folk song not a folk song”.

Folk music has always been a part of musical life but it is only in the 19th.Century that composers began talking a serious interest into the music of the streets and fields.

Culture is a bit like Pygmalion’s statue.Once it has been taken out of it’s “habitat”,it becomes subject to a natural cycle of birth,growth,maturity,decline and death.As society changes,music also changes.Towards the middle of the 19th century some composers felt a certain lassitude developing in the world of the concert hall.Maybe a change of scenery was needed.They didn’t have far to go to find the remedy . It was on the other side of the railway tracks ,in the fields and villages of an uneducated agrarian society.In this society music was not a commodity,a profession dependent on the generosity of Church,State,Royalty or the rich but an art alive and throbbing in the homes of peasants and workers.And because it had never been regulated or “improved” it had freshness ,freedom and vitality .For  composers looking for inspiration it was a shot in the arm.But how were you going to deal with this ,rough,raw ,

and unrefined material .Would you have to “educate” the folk song to make it acceptable in the concert hall ? Would you feel a  moral obligation to “rescue “ it from it’s environment ?Would you have to do a Henry Higgins and kill the flower girl in order to create a society statue ?

When Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto was premiered in Vienna the leading music critic of the day ,Edward Hanslick wrote the following. “It gives us for the first time the hideous notion that there can be music which stinks to the ear”.Tchaikovsky’s use of folk song in the concerto’s finale confronted Hanslick ,with the music of a world he didn’t know and would have hated,the Russian  village,a place of  emotion and raw energy, but not a “nice” place to be.This was the complete opposite of the polite,refined,cultivated,stultified society which to him represented civilisation, a mode of living full of rules ,regulations,and unacknowledged

hypocrisy. It was in such a society that Henry Higgins wanted to show off his artificial creation- the modified Eliza Doolittle. Such an attitude has become infamous in our time.    “In order to save it you have to kill it “.