bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Songs, duets and partsongs
Authors: Radcliffe Philip
Published: November 2023

A general idea of the value of Mendelssohn’s songs can be obtained by putting them beside their equivalent in the instrumental works, the Songs without Words for piano. Though they are more numerous, a smaller proportion of them sink to the level of the weakest of the piano pieces; on the other hand they do not often rise to the level of the best. They contain much pleasant music, but there is a sameness about them in general, and Mendelssohn did not respond to words with the vivid intuition of Schubert or Schumann.
Liszt
Authors: Watson Derek
Published: November 2023

Liszt's career at the centre of the Romantic Movement encompassed the legendary virtuoso tours, the composition and transcriptions which revolutionized the possibilities of the instrument, his important period as conductor in Weimar, his creation of new types of orchestral and choral music, his influence as a teacher, and his lifelong radical approach to harmony, tonality, and form. Derek Watson also examines Liszt's liberal religious philosophy, his artistic aesthetic, and his tireless efforts on behalf of fellow musicians, viewing him essentially as a cosmopolitan, pan-European figure, unique in the breadth of his travels and culture, who drew upon a richly diverse legacy of art, and who in turn left his mark on many different schools of composition. Areas of his music which have been hitherto ignored or forgotten are brought to light, and several myths and misunderstandings about the man and his art are exposed and exploded.
Transcriptions
Authors: Watson Derek
Published: November 2023

No one knew better than Liszt that the piano in the nineteenth century had assumed the importance of the orchestra. This helps explain why the names of eighty composers will be found in section XI of Appendix B. Liszt’s transcriptions and arrangements form, collectively, the most remarkable aspect of his industry - an industry unique among the great transcribers in musical history.
Son of Immigrants (1797-1808)
Authors: McKay Elizabeth Norman
Published: November 2023

Franz Peter Schubert was born on Sunday, 31 January 1797 at 1.30 in the afternoon in the Himmelpfortgrund suburb of Vienna. He was the twelfth child born to the then 40-year-old Maria Elisabeth Katharina, known as Elisabeth (1756-1812), and Franz Theodor Florian Schubert (1763-1830), the local elementary schoolteacher. The boy was baptized on the following day by Father Johann Wanzka, parish priest of the nearby Lichtental church dedicated to ‘the fourteen friends in need’ (Zu den vierzehn Nothe/fern); Johann Karl Alois Schubert (1755-1804), his father’s elder brother, was the child’s godfather. In this time of high infant mortality, when children frequently died within a few days of birth, prompt baptisms were the order of the day. Of the Schuberts’ eleven children so far, although all had survived the first two weeks, seven had subsequently died. The survivors were Ignaz (almost 12), Josef (3), Ferdinand (2), and Karl (14 months). Of these, Josef was to die at the end of the following year, probably of smallpox.1
Schooldays (1808-1813)
Authors: McKay Elizabeth Norman
Published: November 2023

ON September 1808 Schubert attended the Stadtkonvikt to compete in the audition and entrance examination for a place in the Court chapel choir and for the academic privileges which would accompany it. Among his examiners were Anton Salieri and Dr Franz Innocenz Lang, the director of the Stadtkonvikt. According to his brother Ferdinand (1794-1859), jokes were made by other candidates about the pale, whitish-blue coat that Franz Peter was wearing.’ No doubt dressed for the occasion as smartly as his hardpressed parents could afford and in a style they thought appropriate, Schubert overheard the comments, and noticed the mirth of the other boys at his expense: ‘He must be a miller’s son. He’ll get in, for sure!’2-a jest maybe, but reflecting the hard and hungry times in which they were living. Thus, even before his acceptance at the school the boy could have been made to feel awkward, shy, socially inferior or different from his peers, many if not most of whom would have come from more comfortable and privileged backgrounds than his own.
Student and Schoolteacher (1814-1816)
Authors: McKay Elizabeth Norman
Published: November 2023

‘Today I composed for money for the very first time.’ FoR a full three years from the autumn of 1813, Schubert lived at home with his parents and aunt Magdalena in the Saulengasse schoolhouse. He entered the Imperial teachers’ training college as a ‘secular’ (weltlicher) student in November, almost three months before his seventeenth birthday. Here, and in a model school incorporated into the college, the students were trained over a ten-month period to be assistant elementary schoolteachers. They studied basic educational subjects and teaching methods. Schubert tolerated the course and worked sufficiently hard to pass his final examination on 19 August 1814 with comparative ease, and to be described as ‘industrious’ (fleissig) in his practical work.1 His best subjects, or those that came most easily to him, were German language, grammar, and spelling, and also handwriting. In the light of his future rather well written descriptive letters to family and friends, his literary attempts at prose and poetry, and his neat manuscripts, his marked facility for these subjects might be expected. His worst report was for ‘religion’, for which he received his only ‘had’ (schlecht); but as he was a secular candidate this did not affect his overall success in the examination.
La Dolce Vita (1820-1822)
Authors: McKay Elizabeth Norman
Published: November 2023

With reliable and supportive friends like Josef von Spaun, Johann Mayrhofer, and Anselm Hiittenbrenner, and influential patrons of the calibre of Johann Michael Vogl and Ignaz Sonnleithner, the outlook for Schubert at the start of 1820 was promising indeed. Helped by his friends, his reputation in musical circles was growing, particularly as a composer of songs, but also of orchestral and church music; and by the end of 1820 he had already made some impression in Vienna with his music for the theatre. In 1821 he was to enjoy remarkable advances in his profession, with more, and some prestigious, concert performances of his music, publications, and press reviews and notices. By the end of 1822 his situation had changed totally. Composers, like all creative artists, need both stimulation and solitude. Schubert’s closest friends understood this. They knew when it was necessary for him to be alone, and they were ready when he needed them to listen to his latest compositions, to discuss poetic texts, to share his current concerns, or just to relax with him and enjoy his company.
An Expanding World (1825-1826, Part I)
Authors: McKay Elizabeth Norman
Published: November 2023

IN 1825 Schubert seems to have shown few signs of ill health. In the year that followed there was a short spell in August and September when he was to some degree under the weather, a little sick (halbkrank) in August, according to Bauernfeld;1 ailing (kranke!t) in September, as reported by Ferdinand van Mayerhofer.2 This could have been due to syphilis, but might also have been a temporary indisposition, the result maybe of a long summer spent in the hot, unhealthy climate of Vienna. On the whole, the two years were good ones for him, 1825 particularly enjoyable, fruitful, and promising. On the other hand, any successes of 1826 were somewhat overshadowed by financial problems. Professionally, and this despite the public’s declining interest in all classical music, Schubert was doing rather well; and his election in September 1825 to the prestigious position of one of the twenty ‘deputies’ of the committee of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde bore witness to his fast-growing reputation in Vienna. Slight fluctuations in his musical fortunes from one year to the next balanced out overall.
Gloom and Creativity (1827)
Authors: McKay Elizabeth Norman
Published: November 2023

FoR a few weeks from the end of 1826 Schubert lived alone, but in February he returned to the Schobers’, to their new home in the smarter surroundings of the Tuchlauben. Here they occupied the second floor of the house known as the Red Hedgehog, next door to the rather grand premises of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, the Blue Hedgehog, which the society had occupied since 1822. Schubert now had the use of two rooms and a ‘music closet’, presumably an annexe to one of the rooms, and for this comparatively spacious accommodation it is likely that he paid rent. Schober was the manager and possibly joint owner of the Lithographic Institute which was situated in the Michaelerplatz and where he had been employed since the summer of 1826.1Although his new apartment was more elegant and larger than that in the Backerstrasse, his business was struggling, and he would have been grateful for the little extra income that Schubert’s rent provided. For his part, Schubert now had both a pianoforte always to hand and the opportunity to entertain his own guests in the privacy of his rooms.
Principles of Transcribing and Editing
Authors: Caldwell John
Published: November 2023

There are really only two fundamental requirements for an edition of music: clarity and consistency. In this respect there is no difference between a ‘scholarly’ and a ‘practical’ edition. The aim in both should be the same: to provide a musical text which can be trusted, and to do so in such a way that the music can be easily assimilated by the eye. There is qo place for ‘scholarly’ editions which use barely legible forms of notation, or for ‘practical’ editions which provide insufficient information about the materials on which the text is based. Of course a sumptuously designed collected edition can often afford to include supplementary information-biographical, documentary, etc.-which is not strictly germane to the text; but that is another matter. The text of a collected edition should be per formable as it stands. In the same way a ‘practical’ edition, however much advice it may give to the performer, should not distort the original and should be careful to distinguish between the composer’s work and the editor’s.
Medieval and Early Renaissance Music
Authors: Caldwell John
Published: November 2023

This chapter deals with the period up to about 1450, though some of its recommendations are applicable to the early part of the following period as well.

Medieval music presents perhaps the severest problems to the editor. A legible transcription into modem notation necessarily results in an appearance totally at variance with that of the original source; and yet the editor must be sure to avoid anachronistic conventions. A further difficulty is that the transcription of a good deal of medieval music involves a certain amount of conjecture; but the editor must commit himself to the solution of problems which may not readily admit of one. We shall consider first some of the difficulties associated with the presentation of mensurable music, before going on to consider the special problems of monophony and some smaller points of detail.
Baroque and Classical Music
Authors: Caldwell John
Published: November 2023

In editing the music of comparatively recent times the difficulties are considerably lessened, but the temptation will perhaps be to assume too readily that the solution to various problems lies on the surface. The topics will be dealt with in this chapter in much the same way as in those preceding; but while to a large extent the treatment will be (as previously) self-sufficient, a reading of those chapters will help in understanding the back ground to some of the problems discussed. Occasionally, specific reference will be made to the discussion of minor matters which do not require renewed attention in this chapter.
The Lyric Art of the Trouvères: The Courtly Chansons of Gautier de Dargies
Authors: O’neill Mary
Published: November 2023

Gautier de Dargies was a seminal ﬁgure among the early generation of trouvères: not only does his output demonstrate a profound and sophisticated assimilation of the lyric art imported from his southern predecessors, but it also demonstrates a skill, ﬂair, and individuality which helped to establish trouvère art as a distinctive entity. Born c.1170, his career overlapped with, among others, those of Blondel de Nesle, Chastelain de Coucy, and Gace Brule´, and his work was to have a considerable inﬂuence on his contemporaries and successors. Dargies’s output comprises twenty chansons (two of which survive without music, and in the case of three others, the attribution is uncertain), and three descorts.
Multimedia as Metaphor
Authors: Cook Nicholas
Published: November 2023

As We Saw in Chapter 1, Eisenstein rejected synaes-thetic correspondences as a viable basis for the relationship between music and moving pictures, and emphasized instead the need to forge associations between the two media within the context of the individual film. But how is this to be done? Eisenstein’s model of music-picture relationships turns out to be less different from Kandinsky’s than the acerbic nature of his critique of the painter might suggest. Like Kandinsky’s, his basic model of cross-media relationships seems to be triadic: picture and music are related not directly, but by virtue of something that they both embody. And at first sight this something is not very different from the ‘inner sound’ which, for Kandinsky, unified sound and colour; indeed, there is one place in The Film Sense where Eisenstein actually talks about ‘the unified “inner sounding” ‘ of a sequence in his film ‘Alexander Nevsky’.1 Similar terms are scattered throughout the book, and sometimes they suggest what might be dubbed the occult nature of music-sound relationships:
The Musical Organization of the Dresden Court, 1734–1745
Authors: Stockigt Janice B
Published: November 2023

The following years of Zelenka’s life were marked by the complete musical ascendancy of Hasse in Dresden, renewal of the opera, and the consequent loss to the Catholic court church of the musical focus and prestige which had been its privilege since the early 1720s. Friedrich August II and Maria Josepha, with their new royal responsibilities, were frequently absent from Dresden, spending long intervals in Poland. The new Elector-King’s love of hunting meant that the castles of Moritzburg and Hubertusburg became focal points for the court, the hunt season influencing its place of residence for parts of each year.
Introduction
Authors: Maunder Richard
Published: November 2023

Although much has been written about eighteenth-century Viennese key board music, especially that of the Haydn-Mozart period, there has been surprisingly little serious research into the instruments for which it was com posed. Viennese harpsichords are not mentioned at all in Hubbard’s Three Centuries of Harpsichord Making, and just one was included in the second edition of Boalch’s Makers of the Harpsichord and Clavichord; even in the recent third edition only four are listed. Still less is known about clavichords, and the orthodox view in many quarters is that such instruments made almost no impact in South Germany and Austria.
The Musical Sources
Authors: Cooper John Michael
Published: November 2023

The manuscripts for the ‘Italian’ Symphony have contributed to the confusion regarding the relative authority of the two principal versions. Unlike contemporaneous works for which an authoritative Fassung letzter Hand is available (such as the Piano Concerto in G minor, Op. 25, the three concert overtures Opp. 26, , and 27, the Six Preludes and Fugues for Piano, Op. 35, the oratorio St Paul, Op. 36, or even the posthumously published Konzertstücke, Opp. 113 and 114), the ‘Italian’ Symphony confronts us with a skeletal, yet convoluted musical Quellenlage.
Knowing Mendelssohn
Authors: Cooper John Michael
Published: November 2023

The question, of course, is actually a complex of questions, depending in part on whether we understand the infinitive ‘to know’ experientially or epistemologically. The simplest approach might seem to be to use the word in the sense of ‘kennen’ (to be acquainted or familiar with), but if the composer’s will is taken into consideration even this definition leads to a quagmire, for by the 1840s Mendelssohn clearly desired that the work not be known. To perform and study it in any of the surviving versions is, therefore, to contravene that desire deliberately. Nor are meaningful compromises easily attainable. Performances of the familiar version sup- press his thrice-reiterated view that the 1833 version of the last three movements is inadequate and specifically inferior to the version represented in the 1834 revision score. Yet performances of the 1834 score must either present a ‘decapitated’ A major Symphony or combine the latest surviving version of the first movement with composer’s preferred version of the last three—producing a composite symphonic whole that never actually existed.
Lutos ławski’s Aesthetics: A Reconstruction of the Composer’s Outlook
Authors: Skowron Zbigniew
Published: November 2023

One thing, however, is always undeniable to me: no sound sequence, no vertical aggregation should be composed without regard being given to every single detail of expression, colour, character, physiognomy. Even the minutest detail should satisfy the composer’s sensitivity to the maximum degree. In other words, there should be no indifferent sounds in music.’
Microtones in the Music of Lutos ł awski
Authors: Petersen Peter
Published: November 2023

Microtones are defined nowadays as intervals ‘smaller than a tempered semi tone’. As the system of twelve equally tempered pitches within an octave is only some three centuries old, and confined, furthermore, to European art music, microtones-or microintervals-actually represent the rule in music, and the division of the octave into equidistant intervals the exception. However, when we consider how ‘well-tempered’ tuning of keyboard instruments has triumphed world-wide in its short existence, the issue quickly recedes in the face of a musical practice in which ‘impure’ intonation and the ear’s automatic ‘correction’ of pitches are everyday phenomena.
Binchois and Sacred Music at the Burgundian Court
Authors: Haggh Barbara
Published: November 2023

Burgundian court statutes and book lists give ample evidence that the itinerant court chapel followed the ‘usage of Paris’ in its daily sacred ritual, which included the singing of discant as well as of chant. How the use of Paris was realized at the court and how composers followed its prescriptions have never been thoroughly investigated, however. Victor Leroquais does address the historical importance of the use of Paris to the Burgundian dukes in the lengthy introduction to his edition of the mid-fifteenth-century breviary of Philip the Good (Brussels, BR 95n and 9026), and Mary Jennifer Bloxam reveals Parisian variants in the cantus firmi of three polyphonic hymns by Binchois and a polyphonic alleluia by Busnoys. Yet music lies outside Leroquais’s plan and Bloxam analyses only selected works, leaving aside, for example, the individual mass movements and Magnificats by Burgundian composers.
Bridging the Medial Caesura: The Wraparound Rondeau
Authors: Bailey John Andrew , Amici Beth Anne Lee-De
Published: November 2023

The puzzle of how to perform the rondeau form seems to have been long solved; its repetition scheme is now memorized alongside that of sonata form. Unlike the parts of sonata form, we usually view the rondeau’s two blocks of music, A and B, as related but clearly delineated: juxtaposed, not linked, in the pattern ABaAabAB. Even in those fifteenth-century rondeaux in which the A section flows smoothly into the B section, modern performances have most commonly paused on the concluding cadences of both the half-strophe (the first’a’) and the half-refrain (the second ‘.A) in order for the singers to return to the beginning. Ideally, we find signa congruentiae in the manuscript marking the note on which each voice is meant to stop. In fact, the signum is often either missing in one or more voices or seems to be misplaced. The rondeau editor traditionally adds the missing signa and moves the misplaced ones to end the A section on a relatively stable sonority, ideally at a cadence.
Towards a Theory of Text-Music Relations in the Music of the Renaissance
Authors: Perkins Leeman L
Published: November 2023

It could be argued that no other topic recurs so frequently in discussions of the music of the Renaissance as text-music relations. It is likely to be included in a variety of contexts, whether the specific focus is a composer, a compositional genre, or the definition of musical style. And in some instances—as, for example, where the Italian madrigal is concerned—consideration of the interrelationships of words and music is clearly unavoidable. There is, in addition, an extensive literature devoted primarily to some aspect of these matters, ranging from occasional articles scattered through various journals to Don Harran’s comprehensive and carefully documented study.
BBC Programming: Holst, Vaughan Williams and Poulenc (1936)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

For June-July the musical programme of the B.B.C. are not its brightest. There is the usual sprinkling of light orchestral and classical chamber music programmes, suitably interspersed with part-songs by the various teams of B.B.C. singers octets and choruses. But for the more adventurous listener there is not much excitement. The Canterbury Festival on when Dr. Boult is taking down section of the B.B.C. orchestra, contains Holst’s St. Pauls Suite as the sole representation of 20th Century music.1 [This charming work for strings alone will not be found particularly exhilarating for the admirers of Berg or Bartok.]2 Let the interested listener note the final passage, exacting both for the technique and nerves of the leading first violin-a tactless, and may we suggest, not particularly successful experiment on the part of the composer.Vaughan Williams’ piano concerto will be played by Harriet Cohen on Not one of the most popular works of this [illegible] laureate of English musicians, though its admirers rejoice in the Lisztian flavour of the piano writing, and in the Central European atmosphere of the harmony-Bartok being put in his place, no doubt.
An English Composer Sees America (1940)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

In April of last year, I left England on a vacation trip across the Atlantic, a vacation rather from the general European atmosphere than from overwork. I spent two months in Canada, and since last August have been chiefly in and around New York with occasional visits to the Middle West. I have found this country enormously stimulating, and, as I have met many of the chief figures in American music today, I have had perhaps as good an opportunity as most foreigners of comparing conditions in this country with those in their own. There has been recently a lot of correspondence about American music and the treatment of American composers. It has been the chief topic of conversation in many musical circles to which I have been introduced, and it has been the subject of many articles and essays. Let me say straightaway that, in my opinion, the American composer has little to grumble at; compared with English composers, nothing. Whatever struggle American music may have had in the past for its fair.share of public recognition, today the composer here, compared with his English brother even in normal times, has a very rosy prospect.
On Film Music (c. 1940-r)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

LEYDA: In answering the following questions, illustrate, wherever this is advantageous and possible, by a reference to a film for which you have written the music, and quote from the score.I. Do you assist in the choice of sequences for which music is to be written?BRITTEN: If possible-in my experience in documentaries, yes, in Commercials, no.LEYDA: 2. To consider first the single film sequence-do you work on the music from the script or from the finished film sequence?BRITTEN: All depends on the kind of film. In some documentaries I have done, the picture was cut to the music after the latter was recorded-a luxurious procedure.LEYDA: 3. (a) Does your musical imagination have to fit itself to particulardetails dramatic or visual of film sequences; or is it free to produce its own musical terms for the essence or quality of the sequence as you see it?BRITTEN: It depends on the character of the film. Usually if the picture is serious one finds a musical equivalent to the emotions being shown on the screen. If the picture is lighter, or a cartoon, a lot of synchronization with details on the screen can be used.LEYDA: 3. (b) What-in onecase or the other-is theeffect of your procedure on 1) the music, 2) the film?
Appeal to the Appellate Tribunal (1942)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

That the local Tribunal failed to appreciate the religious background of my conscience trying to tie me down too narrowly to a belief in the divinity of Christ. I don’t seek as suggested to pick & choose from his teaching, but I regard the whole context of his teaching & example as the standard by which I must judge. It is for this reason that my conscientious objection covers non combatant as well as combatant service in the army. The reference to the RAMC & non-combatant service in the summary of further evidence does not fairly represent what I tried to convey to the Tribunal. I could not conscientiously join the RAMC or the non-combatant corps, because by so doing I should be no less actively participating in the war than if I were a combatant against which service the Tribunal recognised the validity of my objection. I realise however that in total war, it is impossible to avoid all participation of an indirect kind but I believe that I must draw the line as far away from direct participation as is possible. It is for this reason that I appeal to be left free to follow that line of service to the community, which my conscience approves & my training makes possible.
250th Anniversary of the Death of Henry Purcell (1945)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

Henry Purcell was the last important international figure of English music. Ironically the continent of Europe has been more aware of his greatness than this island which produced him. But that he should be to the English public little more than a name in history books is not altogether strange, for he is the antithesis of the music which has been popular for so long in this country. Think of his unfettered rhythms, boldly discordant harmonies, his long soaring melodies without automatic repetitions of’memorable’ phrases, and especially his love of the virtuoso, the operatic, and conscious exploitation of brilliant sounds; then remember the bulwarks of music in 19th century England! One obvious reason for his neglect has been the lack of accurate (unexpurgated) convenient and vital editions of his work. The great majority of his music has, as an integral part, the thoroughbass which must be ‘realised’ before it comes to life. When one considers the problems of this realisation, one has to admit that the creative imaginations of critics, musicologists, or musical historians (who have exclusively tackled it) are scarcely adequate for the task. Each work must be re-thought in order to evolve textures and figurations to express its mood, remembering all the time the effect of those instruments for which it was conceived. The figuring of the basses is often spasmodic, and the realiser must soak himself in the composer’s idiom in order to provide natural Purcellian harmonies for the melodies. Nor must he be afraid of those very Purcellian qualities of clarity, strangeness, tenderness and attack. But what a rewarding task it is! One can learn endlessly by becoming intimate with such a gift as his. There seems to be nothing this composer cannot do.
Sinfonia da Requiem (1946)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

In the early autumn of 1939 I was approached by the Japanese Government through the British Council to compose a work to commemorate the two thousandth anniversary of the Japanese dynasty. I replied that I would be willing to do so on condition that I was left free in the choice of subject and medium, and specified that I was unable and unwilling to provide any jingoism. The reply to this was definitely in agreement to my conditions, but for six months I waited for the actual contract. When this finally arrived I was working on the ‘Sinfonia da Requiem,’ which was a tribute to the memory of my parents. Owing to this delay I was left with something like six weeks in which to complete the required symphony, and I replied that the only work I could provide in the time would be the said ‘Sinfonia da Requiem.’ I discussed the suitability of the work with the local Japanese consul, indicating its nature, and telling him that each movement had a Latin title-Lachrymosa, Dies Irae, and Requiem Aeternam. He communicated, I presume, with his ambassador and I was notified that the work was considered entirely suitable. I accordingly completed the score, delivered it to the consul, and for at least six months heard no more. In the autumn of 1940 I was summoned to the consul. He then read, with gradually mounting passion, a long letter from Prince Konnoi, brother of the then Prime Minister of Japan, who was organising the festival. This letter accused me of insulting a friendly power, of providing a Christian work where Christianity was apparently unacceptable, that the work was gloomy, and so on. I replied to this letter in as dignified a manner as possible, saying that since I was a Christian and came from a Christian country, the work was (not surprisingly) Christian, denying that it was gloomy, denying the insult, and so on. This letter was sent for approval to the local British consul and other British officials, and sent off to Tokyo. I awaited the next move.
Paul Beck 1895-1958 (1959)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

This has been a sad year for us; Erwin Stein,1 invaluable friend of the Festival, director of the English Opera Group, died in July; later in the year we lost Sir Arthur Jarratt,2 also director of the E.O.G., and for many years a warm supporter of the Festival; and then in December came the sudden death of Paul Beck.3There is an infinity of things great and small which every year must be done to keep the Festival running. These things happen behind the scenes, without even our small glare of publicity. Most people do not realise the size of such a job as keeping our keyboard instruments in tune and good order. We often have three or four pianos, large and small, usually more than one harpsichord, occasionally an eighteenth-century piano too, travelling to and from the [Aldeburgh Parish] Church, the Jubilee Hall, Framlingham, Blythburgh, each instrument with its own temperamental idiosyncracy. To see Paul Beck at work was a lesson to us all. Calm at the most tense moments, the few minutes between the last anxious rehearsal and the admittance of the audience, patiently waiting at the crack of dawn for the Church doors to be opened to prepare a harpsichord for the morning’s performance or rehearsal, putting the instruments tenderly to bed after a Late Night, soothing and helping a nervous performer before and during a performance (I speak from personal experience)-all this was the sign of the true artist. Paul Beck since the first days of the first Festival had become the warm and trusted friend of us all. He will be most sadly missed.
A New Britten Opera (1960)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

Last August it was decided that for this year’s Aldeburgh Festival I should write a full-length opera for the opening of the reconstructed Jubilee Hall. As this was a comparatively sudden decision there was no time to get a libretto written, so we took one that was ready to hand. I get a lot of letters from young people asking me how they should use their talents, and I always reply that they should try to fit them into their surroundings. This is what has happened with my new opera. It is an example of how local conditions can determine what you do. I have always loved the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’. As I get older, I find that I increasingly prefer the work either of the very young or of the very old. I always feel the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ to be by a very young man, whatever Shakespeare’s actual age when he wrote it. Operatically, it is especially exciting because there are three quite separate groups-the Lovers, the Rustics, and the Fairies-which nevertheless interact. Thus in writing the opera I have used a different kind of texture and orchestral ‘colour’ for each section. For instance, the Fairies are accompanied by harps and percussion; though obviously with a tiny orchestra they can’t be kept absolutely separate. In writing opera, I have always found it very dangerous to start writing the music until the words are more or less fixed. One talks to a possible librettist, and decide together the shape of the subject and its treatment. In my case, when I worked with E. M. Forster or William Plomer, for instance, we blocked the opera out in the way that an artist might block out a picture. With the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’, the first task was to get it into manageable shape, which basically entailed simplifying and cutting an extremely complex story-one can only hope that one hasn’t lost too much, but since the sung word takes so much longer than the spoken word, to have done the complete ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ would have produced an opera as long as ‘The Ring’.
A Tribute to Wilfred Owen (?1963)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

I am delighted to read that Birkenhead Institute is paying a tribute to its old pupil, Wilfred Owen. I have read with interest of his days at the Institute, and feel sure that he owed a great deal to its sympathetic encouragement. I would only like to add that Owen is to me by far our greatest war poet, and one of the most original and touching poets of this century.
Francis Poulenc 1899-1963 (1964)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

To the average Englishman, Francis Poulenc’s music may have appeared that of the typical French composer: witty, daring, sentimental, naughty. In fact Francis was very easily depressed, shockable, unsure, and liable to panic. No one who saw it will ever forget his agony in a boat on Thorpeness Meare, and it was really his horror of the sea which finally stopped him from coming back to Aldeburgh in 1958 to play in Tiresias.1 He was always re-writing his music and he burnt his only String Quartet.Which is not to say that he had not a strong personality. He was not ashamed to admire and to borrow-Mozart, Chabrier, Stravinsky, Mussorgsky-but the result was very definitely Poulenc. He proudly called himself Latin, yet admitted that instinct was his guide. He put a high value on Sincerity: he was himself too innocent to be insincere. The two sides of his art (as represented by the Stabat Mater2 and Les Mamelles) were supposed to be very clearly and consciously juxtaposed; on the contrary it was one of his most adorable qualities that he was incapable of being anything but himself-a delightful friend and a lovable musician.
On Receiving the First Aspen Award (1964)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

Ladies and Gentlemen, when last May your Chairman and your President told me they wished to travel the 5000 miles from Aspen to Aldeburgh to have a talk with me, they hinted that it had something to do with and Aspen Award for Services to the Humanities-an award of very considerable importance and size.1 I imagined that they felt I might advise them on a suitable recipient, and I began to consider what I should say. Who would be suitable for such an honour? What kind of person? Doctor? Priest? A social worker? A politician? Well, ... ! An artist? Yes, possibly (that, I imagined, could be the reason that Mr. Anderson and Professor Eurich thought I might be the person to help them). So I ran through the names of the great figures working in the Arts among us today. It was a fascinating problem; rather like one’s school-time game of ideal cricket elevens, or slightly more recently, ideal casts for operas-but I certainly won’t tell which of our great poets, painters, or composers came to the top of my list.Mr. Anderson and Professor Eurich paid their visit to my home in Aldeburgh. It was a charming and courteous visit, but it was also a knock-out. It had not occurred to me, frankly, that it was I who was to be the recipient of this magnificent award, and I was stunned. I am afraid my friends must have felt I was a tongue-tied host. But I simply could not imagine why I had been chosen for this very great honour. I read again the simple and moving citation.2 The key-word seemed to be ‘humanities’. I went to the dictionary to look up its meaning, I found Humanity: ‘the quality of being human’ (well, that applied to me all right). But I found that the plural had a special meaning: ‘Learning or literature concerned with human culture, as grammar, rhetoric, poetry and especially the ancient Latin and Greek Classics’. (Here I really had no claims since I cannot properly spell even in my own language, and when I set Latin I have terrible trouble over the quantities-besides you can all hear how far removed I am from rhetoric.)
Tribute to Michael Tippett (1965)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

My dear Michael,Now it is your turn! A year ago I had one of these ‘memorial’ years and so I know what you are in for. I am sure you will be touched by the tributes, but I hope you won’t be too embarrassed by all the ‘evaluations’. You must not be made to feel-as I was-that you are already dead and that the musicologists are busy on the corpse! We both have a lot more notes to write yet!Evaluations, comparisons-the whole apparatus; does it mean anything to you? It doesn’t to me, much. Slaps or bouquets, they come too late to help, long after the work is over. What matters to us now is that people want to use our music. For that, as I see it, is our job--to be useful, and to the living. Criticism likes to separate, to dislodge, to imply rivalries, to provoke jealousies. But I don’t think I am jealous-(yes, envious, possibly of the man who can do something much better than I can), and the colleagues whom I admire, I regard as friends on the side of the angels rather than as rivals. Do you remember the story of Haydn banging the table and rushing from the room when someone poked fun at Don Giovanni (I think it was)? He knew very well the problems of finding the right notes and balancing forms. Schumann, too, who later found such difficulty in getting the courage to write at all, was the tenderest of critics. What does it matter if some of the people he admired mean little to us? His first duty was to his contemporaries, not to us. No one could have expressed the agony of composition more sympathetically than yourself, Michael, when you wrote about me last year.1 For you are a composer, living in the same environment, facing the same problems as myself. This is the natural soil for friendship, and friendship is stimulating and creative and unifying.
An Interview With Benjamin Britten (1967)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

BRITTEN: The story of how I came to write Peter Grimes was perhaps rather interesting. I was in California at the time and happened to pick up an old copy of The Listener, a very good English journal which reports radio talks; I found in it a talk by the English novelist E. M. Forster on the works of George Crabbe. There were quite a few quotations from the poem ‘Peter Grimes’ by Crabbe and I don’t know whether it was homesickness or a sudden opening of my eyes to a new poetic style, or both, but I was amazed and thrilled by this poetry. I went into Los Angeles a few days later and, in an old second-hand shop, I found a copy of the works of Crabbe and devoured them avidly. The idea of writing an opera came almost immediately, although it would be the first full-length opera I’d ever written. I didn’t start it until I got back to England, but meantime I had talked it over with Peter Pears, who was with me, and we had planned the action very thoroughly together. But it was a chance reading of that old copy of The Listener which sent me to the poem ‘Peter Grimes’ by Crabbe.I told this story to Koussevitsky when he was performing a work of mine very soon after this chance finding and he asked me why I didn’t start writing the opera. I said, quite frankly, that one must take a long time off to write an opera and one can’t always afford to do it, but that I hoped one day to be able to. He then asked me whether if he found the money so that I could take the time off, I would write it. I said certainly I would ... and that was how I began work on Peter Grimes.
Britten And Pears (1967)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

Pears and I started working together I suppose because of similar musical interests, and being close friends because of convenience of environment: it was fun to sing and play together the music of all periods which we liked. But more fundamentally, I was attracted, even in those early days, by his voice, which seemed to me to emanate from a personality, and not, like many other voices, to be a manufactured affair, super-imposed. It has always been exciting to explore unknown music together; he is a fine musician and an excellent sightreader. Added to this his flexible voice, with from the beginnings an excellent technique, enabled us to explore music from widely different styles: from the early lutenists (which in those early days, before the advent of Julian Bream, I used to play for him on the piano) and Purcell and Bach, through 19th century Lieder, and French and Russian songs, to the moderns and including operatic arias of all epochs and countries. Above all, perhaps, Pears has always possessed the all-important gift of being able to phrase music, of singing a series of notes in such a way that they make sense, musical sense. It is this gift, shared with all my favourite artist friends, from Dennis Brain to Rostropovitch, which has excited me to write music for him-which I’ve done with the utmost pleasure for thirty years.
The Ugliness of Early Pre-Raphaelitism
Authors: Bullen J B
Published: November 2023

This was the first major clash in the British art world between the establishment and the avant-garde and it began with the summer exhibition of the Royal Academy in 1850.At that show the work of Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Charles Collins, together with pictures by Dante Gabriel Rossetti at the National Institution, triggered volley after volley of ferocious attacks on what Taylor called, these ‘deplorable examples of perverted taste ‘.2 This was not the first time that London had seen painting by these artists, and unease had been expressed about their strange pictorial mannerisms, but the growing disquiet and discomfort about their unconventionality finally burst forth in 1850. But the terms of expression read strangely to modern eyes: they seem overheated and violent, and they are couched in a language which is strained and brutal.
‘A great purifier’: The Great War in Women’s Romances and Memoirs 1914-1918
Authors: Potter Jane
Published: November 2023

Romance and memoir are by far the most common forms used by women writers during the First World War. Most of the authors are unknown to us now. The works themselves are not ‘great literature’, but they are of literary and historical interest for what they say about the place of women in, and their attitudes towards, the Great War. The texts I shall examine in this chapter all share a common theme: that of the transformative power of war. They also share the eugenic anxieties about physical, mental, and spiritual deterioration which emerged in Britain towards the end of the nineteenth century. If society was suffering from a ‘degenerative’ disease, ‘a falling-off from original purity, a reversion to less complex forms of structure’, then war was a means of regeneration and purification. It was a eugenic good. The ‘conservative polemic of popular fiction’ had a number of ‘unfit’ targets. Among them were exotic and erotic artistic tastes such as highbrow art, aestheticism, and art nouveau. A further threat to both women and men was the suffrage movement. It was blamed for de-sexing women, encouraging them to become pseudo-men, and causing them to lose all touch with their ‘feminine’ natures. Such were the ideas that abounded in the press and in various sections of society.
HD’s War Neurotics
Authors: Tate Trudi
Published: November 2023

At the beginning of August 1914 the modernist writer Hilda Doolittle learned that she was pregnant. The baby was stillborn in May 1915-killed, HD believed, by the Great War. Not long before the child was born, HD had been shocked by some bad news: the sinking of the passenger ship Lusitania, in which 1,200 civilians died. Whether medically true or not, HD’s view that the war indirectly killed her child is a significant and by no means unusual response. HD proposes a direct relationship between violent public events and the private lives of civilians during wartime; she suggests that civilians, like soldiers, may have been subject to crippling war neuroses-an idea which recurs throughout her war writing.
The Great War
Authors: Baldick Chris
Published: November 2023

The Great War of 1914–18 had a greater impact upon the English imagination and its written forms than any other war in history, or than any other definable event in the twentieth century, and few significant literary works of this period can safely be said to have escaped its shadow. T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ (1922), for example, is an oblique war elegy, Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918) a satire on militarism, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatter- ley’s Lover (1928) more directly a fable of the War’s consequences, and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) wears the great historical scar of the War years across its divided structure, as if cut in half by a massacre. The novels and plays of the inter-war years are variously peopled by war widows, war veterans, and war refugees: the shell-shocked Septimus Warren Smith in Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), the bereaved Sarah Burton in Winifred Holtby’s South Riding (1936), and the Belgian exile Hercule Poirot in Agatha Christie’s numerous detective tales are only three among a multitude.
Sex and Sexualities
Authors: Baldick Chris
Published: November 2023

Sex was invented in 1929. At least, the first use of the word ‘sex’ to mean copulation rather than the sphere of differences and attractions between male and female is recorded by OED2 as appearing in D. H. Lawrence’s poem ‘Sex and Trust’, from his Pansies collection of that year. Before then, a couple could have enjoyed a sex-union (from 1898) or sex-relations (from 1911), or the sex act (from 1918), but only now would they be ‘having sex’. They might even have regarded themselves as homosexuals (since 1912), as heterosexuals (since 1920), as bisexuals (since 1922), or as Lesbians (since 1925), these nouns having arrived later than their adjectives. Whether or not they kept up with the arcane terminologies of sexologists (1914), they would soon find it hard to escape the omnipresent sex-interest (1911), sex-awareness (1925), and sex-talk (1931) of their times. This period witnessed an extraordinary dissemination of sexual discourses—medical, legal, popular, and literary—to the point of becoming sex-obsessed (1914).