Obituary Tributes

Dr. J. C. Bradshaw in The Press
...Mr. Lund’s life has been a fruitful one, and the good he has done for music in New Zealand will continue to grow and ever bear more fruit.
...As a critic and writer there is no doubt whatever that his efforts in the cause of art were of great worth. Impatient of anything savouring of superficiality or mere display he would, if he felt the occasion demanded it, speak out with fearless voice. His ink, however, was well mixed with the milk of human kindness, and the writer of these unworthy notes often felt, as others must have felt, that he was, if anything, too generous in appreciation. If he deemed the effort sincere there was no lack of encouragement, and this kindly spirit must have meant much to our younger performers. His great gift as a writer in an adopted language was a source of wonder to many of us; his was the pen of the ready writer. No one reading his valuable contributions to The Press could fail to recognize the open, and indeed youthful, mind which inspired his writing.

Ernest Empson in The Press
But what transcended the purely personal impressions was the feeling that in meeting him one was in contact with a remarkable personality, who represented the line of the great German musical tradition. It seemed incredible to me then, as it does still after many years of reflection and experience, that so great a talent should, be the grace of God, have been led to these shores. There must be many besides myself who will ever be grateful for this strange whim of fate… he brought to New Zealand the quintessence of the romantic school at the very height of its flowering.
Studying with Mr. Lund meant not only the disciplining of hand, eye and ear in the art of pianism, but a wonderful revelation of music’s power; of its address direct to the soul through the noblest emotions. Only those privileged to know him in the heyday of his prime can have any idea of his lion-like energy and the special force of his inspirations. So remarkable were gifts that one felt in his playing the evocation of the genius of the composer. As for his touch, in all my experience on the Continent I have not heard it surpassed for its exquisite beauty and sensitiveness.

Written by The Press
It is our melancholy duty this morning to announce the death of Mr. H. M. Lund, our greatly loved writer on music. Mr. Lund came to Christchurch more than fifty years ago, after a period of preparation that made his arrival in any part of New Zealand a most surprising and beneficent accident. Now that he is dead an era, as Dr. Bradshaw points out, dies with him. For it is not merely that he had known Brahms, von Bulow and Wagner, listened frequently to Rubinstein and Liszt, and been finished off as a player by Madame Schumann. He inherited and as long as he lived expressed and passed on, a tradition that dominated European music for 150 years, and it is impossible now that his place should be filled. It is not even possible to wish it to be filled, however poor we feel without him. For a man of talent who lives to his eighty-fifth year, working almost to his last day, is like a tree that lives till it tops the forest and then suddenly falls; and Mr. Lund had more than talent. He had personality and character, and if he had lived what the world calls clumsily a life of action, or devoted himself to other branches of the life of the spirit, languages or letters, or philosophy, or science, he would still have been remarkable. Just how remarkable he was in the sphere that he did choose is sufficiently indicated in the tributes of Dr. Bradshaw and Mr. Empson; but there is one word that we may be permitted to add ourselves. Dr. Bradshaw says, and it could not be better said, that our columns in future will be “sadly the poorer in the absence of “his enlightened wisdom.” We can go further and say that criticism will be poorer by the loss of a talent for saying, in an adopted language, what has never in New Zealand yet been so well said in any language, and can seldom, in such narrow limits of space and time, have been so well said anywhere. It was a gift that was part and parcel of a rare mind and a rarer character, and it remained to the end.

Short biographies of E Empson & JC Bradshaw can be read in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography