bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
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Authors: Clinkscale Martha Novak , Watson John R
Published: November 2023

Case: Mahogany veneer; open music desk; three octagonal legs carved at top and bottom into acanthus leaves, casters; wrest plank and hitch-pin plate-painted white; four bars; capo tasto bar Inscription: A. Zakrzewski I w Warszawie (brass nameplate); also No 20 (pencilled under music desk) STRINGS: Straight; single-, dOuble-, Triple-Strung; Bass Strings Overspun Action: Viennese Pedals: 2 Att. To Lyre: Una Corda, Damper Present Owners: Poland/Mielec: Private Collection Former Owners: Poland/Mielec: 1974 Purchase By Present Owner References: Vogel (1989) Ep 4133 DATE: 1845 Style: Grand Compass: 6% oct.
Italy And Hanover, 1706-10
Authors: Burrows Donald
Published: November 2023

Handel’s time in Italy during 1706-10 saw the forging of his mature musical style, redressing the imbalance between the learned and lyrical aspects that Mattheson had noted in the early Hamburg years. He must have travelled to Italy in 1706 and left in 1710, but the precise dates of neither his arrival nor his departure are known.
The Music of the ‘Academy’ Years
Authors: Burrows Donald
Published: November 2023

The period 1720-33 saw 18 new operas from Handel, plus one act of Muzio Scevola and two substantial fragments. For a rounded view of Handel’s creative achievement in the opera house there is also a case for taking the pasticcios into account, but even without them (and discounting other movements that were composed for the operas but never performed) there exists more than 55 hours of music.
The Oratorio Composer I: Dublin And London, 1741-5
Authors: Burrows Donald
Published: November 2023

Handel says he will do nothing next Winter, but I hope I shall perswade him to set another Scripture Collection I have made for him, & perform it for his own Benefit in Passion Week. I hope he will lay out his whole Genius & Skill upon it, that the Composition may excell all his former Compositions, as the Subject excells every other subject. The Subject is Messiah.
The Oratorio Composer II: Towards Victory, 1745-9
Authors: Burrows Donald
Published: November 2023

June 1745 found Handel on one of his few documented British excursions away from London. He went first to Exton in Rutland (now in Leicestershire), to the home of the Earl of Gainsborough. There he supplied a short cantata-epilogue for a family performance of a version of Milton’s Comus (There in blissful shades HWV44), though, as the earl’s brother James Noel explained in a subsequent letter, at first the family were hesitant about broaching the matter, since Handel was at Exton as a guest: As Handel came to this place for Quiet and Retirement we were very loath to lay any task of Composition upon him.
The Final Decade II: A Career Completed
Authors: Burrows Donald
Published: November 2023

Handel had managed, with difficulty, to complete ]ephtha and to run his usual oratorio season during Lent 1752. Presumably his increasing disability had been apparent at the performances, and on 17 August 1752 it was announced to the world in a London newspaper: The same newspaper reported, early in November, that Handel had received an operation from William Bromfield, the Princess of Wales’s surgeon, and that there were some hopes for the recovery of his sight.
Performance as Discourse
Authors: Bazzana Kevin
Published: November 2023

There Is The Question of whether a performer should play a creative role, but there is also the question of why. To what end does the creative performer impose himself on the work--or, perhaps more accurately, put himself in the work? Is it only for the sake of random play that the performer should demand some of the composer’s creative authority? I do not mean to underestimate the importance of sheer play in Gould’s work (more on that later), but I believe that for him a performance usually served some higher purpose. In many of his performances, he seems not only to realize or interpret the work, but to discourse about it.
Gould and the Piano
Authors: Bazzana Kevin
Published: November 2023

Glenn Gould Was a pianist. This is, of course, ludicrously to state the obvious, yet it is worth emphasizing the point, for there have been persistent efforts, especially since his death, to exaggerate his achievements in other realms, sometimes at the expense of his piano playing. (It is certainly telling, given the age and size of the posthumous literature, that I am writing the first monograph in English on Gould as a performer.) Gould himself must accept some of the blame: he was always dismissing his instrument of choice as a mere workhorse, denigrating its idiomatic resources, ignoring large parts of its repertoire.
Dynamics
Authors: Bazzana Kevin
Published: November 2023

Gould’S Control Of dynamics was no less extraordinary than his control of rhyrhm; indeed, the two generally operated in tandem. Listen to his piano recording of Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll· on the immediate level the dynamic level rises and falls as the mood of the music demands, yet on the largest level one hears him realizing the whole work-all twenty-four minutes’ worth-as a single, great dynamic hairpin that reaches a climax in bars 295-307, the passage in which the trumpet makes its only appearance in the original; in the final pages, from that climax to the end, his control over the gradual slackening of tempo and reduction in dynamic level must count as one of his most astonishing (if least showy) pianistic feats.
Recording Technology
Authors: Bazzana Kevin
Published: November 2023

The Subject Of Gould’s relationship to recording technology is a large and complex one, and has been discussed at length by Gould himself and others.1 Among classical performers, he was widely known by the 1960s as the greatest proponent of the electronic media--of studio recording, radio and television broadcasting, and film. He was, in Denis Dutton’s words, ‘the closest thing we have to a philosopher of music recording’.2 He was also a leading opponent of live performance, and of the music most appropriate to the concert hall. He felt that concert performance should no longer be the standard of musical behaviour in the late twentieth century.
Lutos ł awskf s Studies in Twelve-Tone Rows
Authors: Homma Martina
Published: November 2023

This title may seem curious to all those familiar with the composer’s statements and interviews. ‘Lutosławski and twelve-tone rows’? Is it not true that the com poser constantly denied any connection with dodecaphony? ‘No, I do not see any relationships to dodecaphony. But if they should exist, they are secondary and superficial
The Stylistic Traits of Lutos ławski’s Works for Solo Instrument and Piano
Authors: Paja-Stach Jadwiga
Published: November 2023

Lutos ławski’s artistic thinking always contained a substantial element of classicism. He valued highly such qualities in a musical work as a clear formal plan, well-proportioned design, logic in the musical process, and balance of expressive devices. Yet although he placed a greater emphasis on classical values, he did not hesitate to apply modern methods in his compositional technique. Thus, the classical aspect of his music does not merely rely on the presence of traits stemming from the classical tradition (this issue would also be worthy of consideration), but is founded above all on the excellent structure of his works, which results from his creative discipline and deliberate adherence to the rules of form.
The War Years (1939-45)
Authors: Mccabe John
Published: November 2023

SIX months after the first performance of the Symphonic Studies in Warsaw, Hitler invaded Poland and the consequence was the outbreak of the Second World War. For a composer who had just achieved his first international successes and was recognized as a major talent, it was as disruptive a blow to Rawsthorne’s career as the First World War had been to Elgar’s. Elgar had been particularly successful in Germany (not surprisingly, in view of the technical basis of his style), and the onset of the First World War suddenly deprived his career of its international context and pushed him back into the more insular world of English musical life. Something similar happened to Raws thorns.
Personal Statements (1963-6)
Authors: Mccabe John
Published: November 2023

RAWSTHORNE’s critical reputation was perhaps never higher than at this time. He had accomplished a substantial broadening of his musical language, had renewed himself so that new works usually accomplished their aims with freshness of purpose and inspiration, and had made what in hindsight seems an inevitable and logical accommodation with serial technique, in a quite unselfconscious fashion.
A Companion to Mozart’s Piano Concertos
Authors: Hutchings Arthur
Published: November 2023

This classic study of Mozart’s piano concertos is, in the words of Alfred Einstein, ‘full of penetrating remarks not ony about the piano concerto but about Mozart’s art in general’. It is here reissued with a new introduction by noted Mozart scholar Cliff Eisen, who, as well as drawing the reader’s attention to the virtues of the volume, also examines at the developments in Mozart scholarship since the volume’s original publication.
The Mozartian Conception
Authors: Hutchings Arthur
Published: November 2023

In 1903 Tovey wrote his monograph The Classical Concerto,’ and showed what the word ‘concerto’ meant to those who first dignified it. Had either theorists or performers mended their ways, there would be no need to write an essay which adds nothing to Tovey’s; but since untruth is repeated in text-books, and people applaud the artistic untruth of vulgarity, it is still a duty to spell out Tovey slowly. They are neither bad text-books nor bad performers who travesty Mozart’s conception of concerto; they have not recognized the generating principles of the most complex instrumental form yet known in western music.
Concerto In E Flat, K. 482
Authors: Hutchings Arthur
Published: November 2023

The fact that there is no concerto between March and December 1785 shows that K. 467 and K. 482 were written for two winter seasons, public concerts being few in the summer months when ‘the quality’ withdrew to the country. After the 1784-5 concert season, Mozart devoted himself to more intimate works than concertos. The six quartets needed completion ; by August they were dedicated and sent off to Haydn. Work then began upon Figaro.
Conclusion. Mozart And Modern Performance Performance: Orchestral And Solo
Authors: Hutchings Arthur
Published: November 2023

Perfunctory and over-delicate performances of Mozart are growing rarer, though this age has introduced distortions of its own; sometimes a piece loses entity in its general movement while each section, each phrase, is well preened and pinned; sometimes exaggeration takes an opposite course, and the taut, lithe exquisiteness of Mozart’s phrases becomes lost in a tempestuous tribute to his poetry. Archaism and ‘historical’ preciosity produce rival falsehoods to Schumann izing or Bcethovenizing.
Introduction
Authors: Schiller David M
Published: November 2023

The title of this book contains not one, but two, oxymorons. The contradiction between ‘Jewish’ and ‘music’ was Richard Wagner’s anti-Semitic invention; the contradiction between ‘assimilating’ and ‘Jewish’, already present in Judaism itself, was reaffirmed in the Zionist response to European anti-Semitism. Ernest Bloch (1880-1959), Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), and Leonard Bernstein (1918-90) did not resolve these contradictions, but in their creative responses to the paradox of assimilating Jewish music, they redefined them. In Bloch’s Sacred Service (1933), Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw (1947), and Bernstein’s third symphony, Kaddish (1963), assimilating Jewish music becomes audible.
Ernest Bloch’s Sacred Service
Authors: Schiller David M
Published: November 2023

This chapter begins with a scene in the drama of assimilation: a humorous and affectionate sketch of Ernest Bloch as a greenhorn immigrant, written for The New Yorker by Bloch’s friend, Waldo Frank.

It was winter. The first evening, he sat entranced in the hotel lobby-so entranced by this new wondrous world that a stranger walked off with his coat. This treatment by America inspired him He adored America: he took out first citizenship papers-and the result was music.

With the Broadway cars jangling outside his window and a vaudeville singer overhead modulating ‘The Rosary’ in sixteenth notes, Bloch finished a Quattuor [sic].
Introduction
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

In August 2001, as this book was nearing completion, the novelist, newspaper columnist, and opera librettist Philip Hensher dared to suggest in the Independent that Britten’s music really isn’t much chop. August is a lazy news month in England and, on cue, BBC Radio 4’s Today programme picked up the gauntlet. Hensher was invited onto the programme to explicate his thesis; Colin Matthews, composer and chairman of the Britten Estate Limited, was pitted against him. The saintly Sue MacGregor participated in an illuminating exchange:HENSHER: The thing to remember about the War Requiem is that it was an official commission for the opening of Coventry Cathedral. It’s full of very highly sound, almost politically correct one might say, views on war, on the importance of reconciliation, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. The trouble is that no one ever listens to the music.MACGREGOR: Don’t they?HENSHER: I mean that metaphorically. I mean Stravinsky said that he couldn’t hear the music for all the Battle-of-Britten sentiment. What people are really listening to is the sentiment and not actually the quality of the music, I think, which is actually not that high.MACGREGOR: And you think Benjamin Britten’s reputation really doesn’t extend very greatly beyond our shores?
Speech to the International Arts Guild
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

Ladies & Gentlemen-I must say it feels very odd standing up here talking to you. My usual place is sitting over there at the piano there [sic), & its the other chap who stands here with his mouth open!! But I can assure you that I wouldn’t have undertaken such an unusual & (I admit) terrifying job unless it was a very important occasion. And such I believe this to be. I believe Contact with other countries, which means other styles, other schools of thought, to be essential to art. Music, I’m sure about-& I think that my colleagues on the platform would agree as to the other arts. In the finest periods of music contact with the continental schools has always been close. John Dunstable in the 14th Century had pupils from Burgundy-who took his ideas abroad, & gave an enormous impetus to the growth of music. In the 16th Century-the Italian madrigals & canzonets were brought here-and these forms were borrowed by the great English composers of that time, with most amazing results as we all know. Perhaps greatest of all-Purcell borrowed enormously from abroad, many forms, new ideas in instrumentation, digesting them, & making them his own-& this is an important point. Foreign influences must be assimulated-& not just blindly accepted-we know only too well the little Mendelssohns of the 19th Century, & little Brahmses, Hinderniths & Debussys of a later date. But to go back to my original point-we in England need the stimulus of the foreign country in music-think of what we can learn from say-France-consciousness of sound, perfection of detail. From Germany. intellectual control, formal balance, & seriousness. From Italy, that wonderful sensuous melodic line-born of a country of fine voices. From Russia, a vividness of colour & lack of inhibitions; & from Austria what I can only describe as the sex-appeal of music.
Introduction And Chronology
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

There is something eerily calm about the penultimate article in Britten’s ‘first period’ of writing (Essay 17). It is modest, unassuming, and totally unprepared for the way the opera it describes would change his life and the direction of British music. Simple facts concerning the origins of Peter Grimes are relayed; modest (and not so modest) hopes for the future of English opera are established; cogent ideas about prosody and opera in English are delivered; and economic arguments about staging native works are incorporated with the easy logic that anticipates the post-war composer-impresario. Yet whatever hopes Britten had for his opera and for a cultured, humane, post-war society, they were at the time of writing unrealized. After Grimes, Britten’s public role was greatly elevated; yet fame muted him, much as pacifism had done in wartime England. And the seeds of paradox were sown; for now Britten was given a forum, a platform, but chose instead to address the issues of his heart and conscience through his music. Thus his prose writings in this second period are less brash, more cultivated than those in the previous one. His opera Gloriana (1953), probably not coincidentally, deals precisely with this conflict between public responsibility and private passion. Essex’s second lute song, in which he longs for a place ‘obscure from all society’ is little different from Grimes’s search for a harbour sheltering peace, yet the difference in Britten’s status as a composer in early 1945 compared to 1953 could scarcely be exaggerated. In part, his journey was that of the boy in Hardy’s ‘Midnight on the Great Western’, one of Britten’s Winter Words (1953), taken to realms beyond his expectation: ‘This region of sin that you find you in, I But are not of’. Fame gave him entree to aristocratic English society; yet his homosexuality, or more precisely the sexual expression of his relationship with Peter Pears, was illegal until 1967. Whatever was his enjoyment of this elite society (and he retained royal connections and privileges throughout his life), he was never really part of it, unable to conform to conventional sexual mores.
An Opera is Planned (1947)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

McKECHNIE: Was it you, Eric Crozier, who thought of the theme first? CROZIER: Yes I think it was originally, wasn’t it, Ben? BRITTEN: How it happened was that we were looking for a subject for a light opera comedy to go with Lucretia which was serious and pretty gloomy. We originally picked another subject which we worked on for a short time. MCKECHNIE: Was that the Jane Austen subject? BRITTEN: Yes, Mansfield Park. CROZIER: That didn’t work out too well.BRITTEN: We’d thought of it and actually worked on it a bit but we’d an awful lot of office work on the formation of the new company, the English Opera Group, and the work itself had to be done rather quickly and Manifield Park was obviously going to be a long, subtle, and complicated job. We liked this de Maupassant theme first of all because it fitted our singers. There was a good part for Joan Cross and Peter Pears, probably for Nancy Evans and Jimmy Sharp as well.1CROZIER: Oddly enough, it was the English possibilities of the French story which attracted us. BRITTEN: In a way that was the first snag.
The Rape of Lucretia (1948)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

Many people think that composers can set any old kind of poetry to music; that any pattern of words may start his imagination working. In many cases that is true. Some of the greatest composers have found inspiration in very poor verse (see Schubert in many places), although not many have gone as far as Darius Milhaud in his ‘Machines Agricoles’-which is a setting of a catalogue. But I believe that if the words of a song match the music in subtlety of thought and clarity of expression it results in a greater amount of artistic satisfaction for the listener. This applies equally to the larger forms-oratorio, cantata and opera. In many oratorios, of course, where the words come from the liturgy or the Bible the composer has the greatest possible inspiration for his music; but with a few exceptions, like Metastasio, Dryden, Da Ponte and Boito, few serious poets have provided libretti for these kinds of works.1 There may be many reasons for this. Opera composers have a reputation for ruthless disregard of poetic values (in some cases rightly)-and all they need is a hack writer to bully, and serious poets won’t stand for that. Besides, it takes a great deal of time to learn the operatic formulae-the recitatives, the arias and the ensembles. The bad enunciation of many singers doesn’t seem to provide a suitable show place for a poet’s finest thoughts. One of the most powerful reasons for a poet’s operatic shyness I suspect to be this. To be suitable for music, poetry must be simple, succinct and crystal clear; for many poets this must be a great effort, and the psychological epic poem to be read (or not read) in the quiet of the study is more attractive. I think they are wrong. Opera makes similar demands of conciseness on the composer. He must be able to paint a mood or an atmosphere in a single phrase and must search unceasingly for the apt one. But this is everlastingly fascinating and stimulating, as it must be to the poet. Similarly fascinating to him should be the problem of continuity, or degrees of intensity, development of character and situation. Also, if he is working together with a sympathetic composer, then the timings and inflections of the dialogue can be fixed exactly and for ever-a thing not possible in any other medium.
Arnold Schoenberg (r95r)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

I mourn the death of Schoenberg. Every serious composer today has felt the effect of his courage, single-mindedness, and determination, and has profited by the clarity of his teaching. The world is a poorer place now this giant is no more. Source: ‘Obituary: Arnold Schoenberg’, Music Survey 4/J (Oct. 1951), 314. Other contributors included Humphrey Searle, Hans Keller, Erwin Stein, Donald Mitchell, and Karl Rankl.
Opera Diary: The Marriage of Figaro (1952)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

Covent Garden. The Marriage of Figaro (February 8).I left this performance of The Marriage of Figaro overwhelmed anew by the enchantment of Mozart’s score. What gaiety and brilliance, what passion and tension, what characterisation, what construction (I say this last deliberately because I for one can never understand comments on the inadequacy of the last act, even with the two clumsy cuts that are traditionally made-but more of that later). Now, I have attended many performances of this miracle in the last ten years or so, when I have been disappointed and irritated: Mozart is notoriously the easiest composer to spoil. My pleasure in this performance was caused principally by the extraordinary precision and beauty of the orchestral playing. The Covent Garden orchestra is now our finest orchestra (think of its playing in i¼zzeck too), but obviously a conductor of genius and energy like Kleiber is essential for it to produce its best.1 I must confess that once or twice I felt Kleiber curbed his natural reactions to the music, probably through a mistaken desire to be ‘classical’; this deprived the overture of some of its delight and the last great aria of Figaro of much of its bitterness. Something also went wrong with the tempi relations of the last finale. But it is wrong to complain when so much of it was so right and so well studied. One quality which particularly delighted me was his treatment of the recitatives. I am so bored with the ‘gabble’ treatment they usually get (Glyndebourne, please note).These had real character and variety of tempo, and so one could hear the tunes which are embedded in them. It was a mistake, though, to put the accompanying piano away in a box, miles from the singers, so that occasionally the synchronisation was not as neat as it might have been.
The Aldeburgh Festival (1955)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

Eight years of Festival making is a considerable period. After eight years, one may be allowed perhaps to take stock of the past and, in the light of the past, make plans for the future. Of the past, we think that our regular Festival patrons and visitors may be left to judge for themselves, They have shown their consistent interest at each Festival by suffering long hours in a stuffy hall or on hard pews to hear what we have offered them, and we deeply appreciate their loyalty. We had very much hoped by this, the eighth Aldeburgh Festival, to have announced confidently the plans for a small theatre in Aldeburgh which would be of real and permanent value to the town and would solve the perennial Festival bottleneck finances.1 This plan has had, at any rate for the moment, to be postponed; expansion has had to yield to economy. Last year’s Festival budget was balanced only because we received some most generous gifts which we cannot expect every year, and because we cut expenditure on rehearsals to the very bone. The financial bottleneck remains the same, and since our expenses (like everyone else’s) have swollen hugely since that first Festival of 1948, it became obvious that we must make some drastic reductions for the future.
Introduction And Chronology
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

If Britten’s journey in the period 1946-55 was metaphorical-a hurried elevation into a society he had spent his twenties openly disparaging or implicitly criticizing-his journey in 1956 to the Far East was as real as it was fruitful. Here he encountered sounds and cultures hitherto largely unknown to him. His reaction to Japan and Bali was registered immediately in his music, much as it had been for Holst, Bart6k, Debussy, and Szymanowski in their encounters with the exoticism of the East. But there were philosophical and dramaturgical consequences as well. This trip was the beginning of a new phase in Britten’s life, in which his retreat from the London performance scene, begun after the unsuccessful premiere of Gloriana and completed in the 1960s, directly affected both his music activities and the subject matter or narrative structure of the works he composed. Eastern sounds and dramaturgy shaped works as diverse as Prince of the Pagodas (1956), the Church Parables (1964, 1966, 1968), and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960). His interest in the poetry and metaphors of night, latent since the Serenade, was reignited. His inversion of the balance between forest world and the courtly palace in A Midsummer Night’s Dream the former attracting his sympathies and most beautiful music, the latter depicted either fractiously or in the briefest of sketches-was a form of magical realism left largely unexplored in his previous stage works, one partly suggested by what he saw as the exotic/erotic promise of the East.
British Culture Abroad (1956)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

Sir,Having recently returned from a concert tour which took us through fourteen countries of the Far East and back, may we offer for your appraisal a few observations which are not entirely irrelevant to some recent correspondence in your columns?1We went as British artists bringing mostly British music, and were soon made conscious of the tremendous interest in all branches of this country’s art, and of the enormous goodwill towards us, at any rate on the cultural level. Our welcome was touchingly warm and enthusiastic, but our visit was as a drop of water in the desert. On a tour such as ours you will meet with musicians, dancers, actors from every country but our own; Russians in Delhi, Austrians in Tokyo, Poles in Madras, and Americans all over South East Asia. Every government but our own realises the importance of cultural propaganda-it must, we suppose, be called that. Four years ago the English Opera Group visiting the Wiesbaden Festival with a complete company of twenty-four was, absurdly enough, considered the most costly Festival Company, and that in competition with a full-scale performance of’Aida’ sent at Italian expense from Rome. In Tokyo, the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra was being flown out by the German Government. This year at Aldeburgh the Dutch Government is offering us, entirely free, a famous Dutch male voice choir. Examples could be multiplied. In Djakarta they had had Martha Graham’s Ballet Company and the Symphony of the Air, as well as a lot of similar stars, all at Uncle Sam’s expense.
The Composer Speaks (1957)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

COOPER: Today in our series The Composer Speaks I’m visiting Benjamin Britten, who is one of our most prolific and versatile composers. Benjamin Britten, I wonder if you could tell us a little of your early life. Would you say that your family was musical? BRITTEN: Well my family wasn’t professional musical at all. My mother sang very sweetly, and my mother-my mother sang, but my father was almost anti-musical I’m afraid, he liked tunes in the minor keys, he used to say. COOPER: Did he walk out if anybody was playing in a major key? BRITTEN: He was inclined to do that. But actually, she sang awfully well and my brother played the violin and I can-one of my earliest memories is not being able to go to sleep at night because of the musical party going on; I used to complain bitterly about that. COOPER: Yes. When did you start yourself to write or to compose? Or did you go to the piano when you were aged four and finger things out on the piano?
Brighton Philharmonic Society (1960)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

I send my warmest wishes to the Brighton Philharmonic Society for the r960-6r season.1 Nowadays, when the decentralization of the Arts in this country is becoming more and more important, when people must be encouraged to want their own ‘live’ concerts and theatres as opposed to ‘canned’ ones or ones in the few big centres, the work of such societies as the Brighton Philharmonic is increasingly vital. My great hope is that the Brighton audiences will flock in big numbers to appreciate this enterprising series of programmes.
Speech on Receiving Honorary Degree at Hull University (1962)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

My Lord and Chancellor, Mr Vice-Chancellor, Ladies and Gentlemen, I am really very touched by the great honour which the University of Hull pays me today, and also for the charming and flattering words in which this honour has just been expressed. I am a creative artist, and therefore suffer frequently from depressions and lack of confidence (most such creatures do), so I cannot help feeling that this honour is a little exaggerated-that I do not really deserve these great compliments; and yet it is these very compliments, and the appreciation behind them, which can lift one out of these depressions, and give one confidence to go on. I am really happy therefore to be able to say thank you in public to you all. Your Vice-Chancellor may not believe me, because I bombarded him with protests when he told me that I should be expected to make a speech this morning. I admit that I hate speaking in public. It is not really a matter of natural shyness, but because I do not easily think in words, because words are not my medium. This may surprise some people, but I suppose it is the way one’s brain is made. I have always found reading music easier than reading books. Even at school I can remember clearly the vocal and energetic surprise with which the other small boys caught me reading orchestral scores in bed. I also have a very real dread of becoming one of those artists who talk. I believe so strongly that it is dangerous for artists to talk--in public, that is; in private one really cannot stop them.!-the artist’s job is to do, not to talk about what he does. That is the job of other people (critics, for instance, but I’m not always so sure about this). I am all for listening to music, looking at pictures, reading novels-rather than talking about them. It is natural for composers to have strong opinions about music, and very narrow ones. They have to be selective. The whole business of giving a musical shape to one’s ideas is so complicated, that when one is in difficulties the influences that can ‘rescue’ one, so to speak, are so precious and important that they are inclined to obscure everything else. I can give an example from my own experience.
On Pravda, Art and Criticism (1963)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

One of the most disturbing features of this time is that so many people seem to prefer to read about art rather than to experience it. Hence the great popularity of the arts pages, the magazine sections of the Sunday papers, the almost ‘best seller’ success of conversations with famous composers, & if I remember correctly not so long ago a book on Hardy’s poems was published when the poems themselves were out of print. Perhaps it is easier to read about things than to do them, or is it that having read the critics one knows what to feel without bothering to think? These oversimplified feelings are prompted by a recent reading of some lectures given on literature by a well-known poet & professor, which put forth points of view so narrowly personal that from the general reader’s point of view I would have thought them quite useless; and by a recent interview given by myself for a foreign newspaper, in which I was quite misreported, and which made nonsense for people who know me or my work.Artists of course are the last people who should talk or write about art, especially their own. I probably expressed my-self badly on this occasion, or the changes were made for reasons of space or other editorial demands. But the fact that this interview has been widely reported in this country (by people who should have known better) prompted me to accept the invitation of the Observer to try & correct some of the impressions.
British Music in the World Today (1964)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

BRITTEN: I’m never very conscious of belonging or not belonging. Obviously one doesn’t belong to the main German-Viennese tradition, I don’t think. On the other hand I’m immensely aware of belonging to the English tradition.AMIS: Yes, but it seems that the music of the Twenties and Thirties seems so homespun. The music of Vaughan Williams is obviously alien to people in France and Germany and Italy, whereas your music and Michael’s seems to have got something that speaks a common language.BRITTEN: Yes that is true. I think one has been immensely encouragedpartly because one wants to make friends-by the reaction of countries as widely apart as Russian and America to one’s tunes.AMIS: I mean your music and Michael’s is profoundly English, but at the same time seems to speak a language that they can understand.BRITTEN: What I think is awfully interesting is that in this country my musicis not considered very English. When one gets abroad-and I’m sure it’s the same with Michael’s music too-one is considered enormously English. They can see the flavour of the nationality much more strongly than people here.AMIS: But is n’t that, don’t you think, because you don’t use all the apparatus that the Vaughan Williamses and so have used-I mean mainly the folksong and the rather homespun quality?BRITTEN: Yes, I think that is true. But I never think it matters awfully if one is fifty years behind or in front. I mean so often in architectural styles we’ve been long after the continental schools, but I mean our Gothic architecture stands up proudly as ever; it doesn’t seem dated.
Sibelius (1965)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

AALTONEN: Mr Britten, as a composer you are master of a variety of branches of music. Would you please tell us which one you prefer working in?BRITTEN: I think the answer to that is a very short and simple one: I prefer working in them all. There’s no kind of music that I don’t want to write. The occasion, of course, demands which kind of music I write in, but it can be any kind from opera, to songs, to instrumental music, to symphonies to quartets; it just depends what I’m asked to do and what I want to do. But I have no blinkers on, if I can put it like that.AALTONEN: You are often referred to as the national hero in the realm of music in Britain; that is exactly the title given to Jean Sibelius in Finland. What is your relationship to Sibelius’s music?BRITTEN: Well I hope I can fulfil a tenth of what Sibelius did for music in Finland. I think my own reactions to Sibelius are personal but perhaps interesting. When I was young I found Sibelius-the music of Sibelius-unsympathetic. I was interested much more in the Schoenberg-Berg-Webern school, and of course the overwhelming personality of Stravinsky. And then quite by accident, not so many years ago-perhaps ten, perhaps fewer-I heard some music of Sibelius without knowing what it was, and I was deeply interested and surprised and even bewildered by this music, which seemed to me to be so new and so personal that I was eager to find out what it was. I discovered it was the Sixth Symphony of Sibelius, which I think is a very, very fine one. After that moment I bought all the scores that I could possibly find of his music, and although I wouldn’t pretend that I know or understand or even like everything he wrote, I find it a most sympathetic, interesting phenomenon in the musical world, and a most important figure. I think it only goes to show how ludicrously unimportant fashions in music are-that for instance in the Twenties there was only Sibelius in England, which was not true, and now there is no Sibelius, which is also not true; a great man like Sibelius can weather all storms of fashion.
Tribute To Dmitry Shostakovitch (1966)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

It must have been in 1936 or so, when I had not long since left the Royal College of Music, my mind greedy for every musical experience to come my way, that I went to the old Queen’s Hall, London, to hear a concert performance of an opera by a new, young Russian composer, not many of whose works had reached England. In my experience a concert performance of an opera does not often succeed in giving much idea of its dramatic impact. But this one, of Lady MacBeth of Mtzensk (as it was then called) was a knock-out.1 I imagine it was well done, enough anyhow to give me a sense of the violence, the irony, the tenderness, and the deep tragedy of the final Act. I was thrilled; I felt this music was new and personal, although stemming naturally from the great Russian past, and, in a wonderful way, relaxed and fluent. It used methods from all periods, and yet remained strikingly characteristic. I was furious with the attitude of the Intelligentsia [sic) sitting in the stalls, laughing and (I thought) sneering. The critics could not fit this music into any school: not that of the (then) all powerful Sibelius, nor Hindemith, nor Schonberg (gathering momentum among the young), nor Stravinsky (famous for his early masterpieces, but disapproved of for anything after I920). In fact it could not be classified at all, and that, as we know, is always disturbing.That performance of Katerina Ismailovna started a deep attachment to the works of Dmitry Shostakovitch.This close connection has never broken, and the faith in his wonderful gift has remained constant. What a pleasure, therefore, when many years later I met Dmitry Dmitriyevich, to find the man as lovable, as characteristic, as great and contemporary as his music. (This experience, like so many other happy ones, came through the good offices of our dear friend Slava Rostropovitch, who loves and honours Dmitry more even than I do-because he knows him better). And what a thrill to find that the great man admitted to receiving pleasure from my own works-so very different from his own, but conceived, many of them, in the same period, children of similar fathers, and with many of the same aims.
The Moral Responsibility Of The Artist Towards His Fellow Man (1968)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

BRITTEN: I believe that the artist must be consciously a human being. He is part of society and he should not lock himself up in an ivory tower. I think he has a duty to play towards his-to his fellow creatures. It is not only a duty; I think it’s a pleasure too. I want to have my music used. I would much rather-this seems perhaps a silly thing to say-but I would rather have my music used than write masterpieces which were not used.COMER: Yes. Well don’t you think that some of your work[s] are masterpieces? BRITTEN: Oh that’s not for me to say at all.COMER: Why not? Why wouldn’t you have the kind of confidence to think that you’ve done-?BRITTEN: Because masterpieces-rather, the word ‘masterpiece’ has a kind of ring about it which suggests lots of dust on volumes in libraries.COMER: Well what kind of attitude do you think society should have to the artist? You seem to have a very gregarious attitude towards society itself, and to give of yourself to society. Do you think society owes anything to you?BRITTEN: Well, I hope society will keep me alive. I hope I shall be able to make enough money to live on, and live perhaps in a way which makes writing music possible, even easy. Not too easy, because we must all fight a little bit.COMER: When you were a child you were a prodigy, weren’t you? I mean you-you started to have ideas-I think you used to say ‘I have an idea’when you were, what, 5 years old?BRITTEN: Well, I came from a very ordinary middle-class family, and I started writing music certainly when I was very small, when I was about 5 or 6; but I didn’t have much musical education, and at my first school that I went to, my private school, where I went at the age of 8 to 14, there was no music at all.1 That’s not quite true. At the end of each term, on the last evening, we sang some songs.
Idomeneo in Performance (1969)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

BRITTEN: Ah, this is not really a new version. It’s a fresh version; perhaps there’s a subtle distinction. We decided on doing Idomeneo for the Maltings because it is the kind of opera, the kind of big, classic piece which would suit the-the character of the building and the fact, of course, that there is no proscenium arch.We had certain ideas of other operas we could do, but we decided on Idomeneo partly because it’s a work that I’ve loved for many years, and it’s a work which, well, Peter Pears wanted to do the part and he felt that it would suit him, and generally, I felt that perhaps I could guide our listeners-our audience-through the very intricate problem of what movements to play when.Of course, there being the two major versions that Mozart left us, therein is the only way that one could possibly call it a new version, in that one has made a slightly different selection from the numbers in the various versions from people who’ve done it recently in the past. It is quite close to the Sadler’s Wells version, with the major change that we are getting Idamante sung by a soprano and not by a tenor-of course [the tenor version] was the way that Mozart rearranged it for the second performance in his own lifetime.AMIS: I didn’t realize-I’m very ignorant on these matters-I didn’t realize that there were two versions by Mozart. There are quite a number of different actual numbers, are there?BRITTEN: Oh yes. I’m not a historian, and I perhaps won’t get my facts absolutely right, but when it was first performed, which was, I think, when he was about 25, it was done as a full-length opera seria, with enormously elaborate arias; but he was a passionate creature, and he could not control his electric dramatic feeling for this subject.The work got more and more elaborate as he wrote it. He had an excellent producer with whom he worked a lot. He had, of course, his marvellous Mannheim Orchestra to write for, and the result was that the recitatives got more and more elaborate, and the nearer they got to the performance, they realized that the work was getting too long, and so right, I think, until a day or so before this first performance,
Radcliffe Music Award (1969)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

For music & the University of Sussex, to-day is an important day. The first term of the Music School is only a few weeks old, and a most important & worthwhile Competition has been organised to celebrate it. Judging by the distinguished staff & the lively music students the department is going to have an exciting life, & enrich the musical life of the county & country. Our indebtness to the RADCLIFFE TRUST, which has made this possible, cannot be measured. We, the jury, assembled to judge this competition organised over a long period with great seriousness & intelligence have had a fascinating time, reading the scores & listening to the fine playing of the Allegri Quartet.2 Four important British composers have been invited to write works and have clearly taken their task very seriously. We have listened carefully & sympathetically to the rehearsals & performances these last two days, & have come to the following conclusion. In spite of, in one case, a brilliantly intelligent gill; in another, a passionate and dedicated career; in the third, a most exciting promise; and lastly a vivid and original personality. we do not feel that one work stands high above the others-a ‘flawless masterpiece’; nor do we feel that any of them lags way behind-a ‘ghastly fl.op’. We would therefore like to divide the prizes equally between the four competitors, & suggest playing one movement from each of the quartets which we have selected. We are disappointed maybe to have come to this ‘middle of the road’ conclusion; but hope that you all, like us, have had an interesting & enjoyable musical experience.
Tribute To Paul Sacher (1976)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

Our dear Paul-We want to join in the chorus of congratulation to you in reaching so triumphantly your seventieth birthday. Though we have not seen you as often as we would like to have done in these last years, whether at Schi:inenberg or Aldeburgh, we have been very clearly aware of how you (and Maja for we cannot think of one of you without the other) continue in your splendid dual capacity as performer and patron.How much do all musicians owe to your skill and your dedication and what have not composers owed to you for many many years now! You have been a model as a patron and performer and all of’Music’s Children’ are grateful to you and proud of you.
Introduction
Authors: Bullen J B
Published: November 2023

Pre-Raphaelitism was the first avant-garde movement in British painting. Around 1848 a group of artists openly challenged the prevailing pictorial conventions in order to create a visual language for fresh and unusual ways of representing the material world. The early pictorial ideals were short-lived and the group soon broke up. What persisted was the nonconformist motive, and other groupings and combinations of artists-inspired mainly by Dante Gabriel Rossetti-continued to paint against the grain of the academic tradition well into the latter part of the nineteenth century. What was originally a movement in painting was later joined by poetry and criticism, and though the aims changed this strain in British art and literature continued to be called ‘Pre-Raphaelitism ‘ by contemporaries.
The Grotesque and the Great War in To the Lighthouse
Authors: Hargreaves Tracy
Published: November 2023

In Realities of War (1920) Philip Gibbs recalled Field Marshal Haig’s derision of the newly appointed war journalists: ‘I think I understand very well what you gentlemen want,’ he said. ‘You want to get hold of little stories of heroism and so forth and to write them up in a bright way to make good reading for Mary Ann in the kitchen and the man in the street.’ Gibbs was among the government-appointed journalists who from 1915 were to send to the home front, subject to censorship, ‘authentic’ records of life on the western front. Haig’s comment is, in some ways, more telling than the ‘colourless phrases of the newspapers’, as Virginia Woolf described them. Not only does his misgiving betray anxieties about protecting a form of fellowship (only ‘those who were there’ could really ‘know’ the war), it also raises questions about what constitutes authentic reportage which, in this case, threatens a specific construction of masculinity.