bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Britten's ‘War Requiem’
Authors: Evans Peter
Published: February 2010

It is only the naïve and the cynical who imagine that the creative artist can be visited unwittingly, without an act of volition, by genius. We cannot doubt that Britten's War Requiem, hailed by many critics as his masterpiece after its first performance in Coventry Cathedral, represents not only an effort to mark worthily the official commemoration of a triumphant recovery from the ashes of war but also a conscious resolve to consummate his whole creative activity to that date in the expression of a personal abhorrence of the bestial wickedness by which man is made to take up arms against his fellow. Even the ground plan of the Requiem reflects this desire to give all, setting up within the one frame the resources of works as contrasted in style as the Sinfonia da Requiem and Cantata Academica, the Nocturne and the Missa Brevis. Yet ultimately we can compare this work only with the operas in its vast scope, as also in its development from the contemplation of a dramatic conflict. In choosing so audaciously to juxtapose the Office for the Dead with Wilfred Owen's bitter war poems, Britten dare not rely merely on the anthologist's good taste that has served him well elsewhere. Unless these two sources could be made to engage with one another, violently if need be, the result could only be disastrous. By now we are all familiar with the pattern of correspondences and analogies he was able to uncover, and the uncanny appropriateness with which such a triple link was forged as that between the Abraham of the liturgical text, of Owen's poem and of Britten's own canticle. The present article attempts to trace some of the musical links that bind the work; that it perhaps fails to do this in tones of clinical objectivity may be pardoned by readers to whom the sounds of this masterly work are still an overwhelming experience.
‘Oedipus Rex’ and ‘Lady Macbeth’
Authors: Britten Benjamin
Published: February 2010

What we print here is the pencil draft of a critical account by Britten of a concert performance of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex and a ‘trail’ for a forthcoming performance of Shostakovitch's Lady Macbeth. The MS is in the possession of Mr. Eric Walter White, who has been kind enough to place it at our disposal. I have silently corrected the punctuation and obvious errors but have otherwise left the text unaltered. With the help of Britten's personal diaries (from which I quote by permission of the composer's executors) I have been able to locate the year in which the performances took place—it was 1936—and also identify the commission which led to Britten appearing (unusually, for him) in the role of critic.
Pousseur's ‘L’Effacement du Prince Igor'
Authors: Witts Dick
Published: February 2010

In 1974 Henri Pousseur created a large-scale homage/critique of Schoenberg,The Trials of Peter the Hebrew. That other mandarin Stravinsky has received two testimonials, a collaborative piece calledStravinsky au futur, andL'effacement du Prince Igor—The Obliteration of Prince Igor. All of Pousseur's resonant titles contain so many associations—here the Russian lineage, the Stalinist embargo, the social position (not King of the Stars?), the aristocratic conceit, the alleged erosion of personality.
Whatever Happened to Chamber Music?
Authors: Bradshaw Susan
Published: February 2010

Taking part in a hastily-prepared performance of a contemporary piece for five players, I found myself wondering yet again: whatever happened to chambermusic? While the piece we played is by now ‘old’ enough to be considered part of the standard 20th-century repertoire, the ad hoc nature of this performance necessarily involved the aid of a conductor—not only because the time at our disposal was inadequate, but also because four of the players didn't know the piece at all, not to mention the fact that two of them had never even met previously, let alone played together. Now while this particular set-up was admittedly an extreme instance, it was unusual only in degree; for it's by no means unique as an example of the sort of circumstances that have come to be accepted by players and audiences alike over the last 50 years or so.
Alexander Goehr: The Recent Music (1)
Authors: Northcott Bayan
Published: February 2010

After the spate of pieces completed in 1970—the grand and scandalously neglected Symphony in One Movement, the two music theatre pieces, Shadowplay and Sonata about Jerusalem, and the Concerto for 11 with its folkloristic connotations—nothing new was heard from Goehr until the first performance of his Piano Concerto in May 1972. He himself confessed that its elaborately compound homophonic-contrapuntal first movement had cost him almost a year of effort; others began to wonder about the demands of his new Leeds professorship, the more so as the next apparent silence lasted two and a half years.
‘The Two Fiddlers’
Authors: McBurney Gerard
Published: February 2010

The twin banes of opera for children are the simply silly and the pretentiously sentimental: talking down to them and talking down to ourselves. In The Two Fiddlers, Maxwell Davies enthusiastically circumnavigates this Scylla and Charybdis, making a children's opera worth the effort that must be spent on it, and incidentally adding a footnote to the recent triumph of the Symphony.
Canyons, Colours and Birds: An Interview with Oliver Messiaen
Authors: Watts Harriet
Published: February 2010

Well, this is what happened. My impresario had introduced me to Miss Alice Tully from New York and Miss Tully wanted to commission a work from me for the American Bicentennial. I had no time and I said that I would be unable to accept her offer, but then she invited me to dinner. In the course of the meal, she told me how much she loved animals and that she travelled to India for the sole purpose of shaking the paw of a lion. Well, at first I laughed at this story, but then afterwards I recalled the account of the ‘Chevalier au Lion’ of Chrétien de Troyes, a French romance of the Middle Ages, and after having laughed, I cried. I said to myself, that woman is amazing, to go all the way to India just to see a lion and shake its paw, that's marvelous, and I accepted the commission.
Josef Matthias Hauer (1883–1959)
Authors: Gustafson Roger S.
Published: February 2010

It is fairly safe to say that if anything is known about the composer Josef Matthias Hauer outside the German-speaking world it is that he was a contemporary of Schoenberg and that, like Schoenberg, he wrote music which employed the twelve-tone method. If anything else is known, it probably is that there was and still is great controversy over who was first to employ this method of composition. Perhaps this article will call into question our unthinking amalgamation of these two composers into the camp of twelve-tone composition.
Partita for Piano and small Orchestra
Authors: de Graeff Alex
Published: February 2010

Markevitch's achievement does not lie in having produced, at 18, a work stamped with the skill of a thoroughly experienced musician. We might well apply on his behalf the observation Radiguet made in declining a success due only to his precocity: ‘Age is nothing. All the great poets were writing when they were seventeen. The greatest are those who succeed in making us forget it.’ But it is wonderful to see the young Markevitch achieving such sure mastery in a field where there is no safeguard to keep him from error and no restriction to prevent him from exceeding his powers.
‘Le Paradis Perdu’: in its time
Authors: Moreux Serge
Published: February 2010

In Paris, between 15 October 1935 and 1 July 1936 there were:

246 symphony concerts with full orchestra,

30 with small orchestra (which is incredibly few),

57 with chorus,

115 chamber music concerts, not counting either sonata evenings or recitals by various instrumental soloists or groups, which make something like 700 performances to add to the above. Altogether, then, if I am to believe the Guide du Concert (from which I have taken these figures, adding a few concerts that were missed there), 1,144 occasions to exercise the reprehensible and avowedly useless profession of music criticism.
The Role of Tonality in contemporary and ‘up-to-date’ composition
Authors: Kupkovic Ladislav
Published: February 2010

I Consider the phrase ‘New Simplicity’ not quite correct, insofar as one is led to assume that present-day music is evolving from an older, more complicated state to a newer, more simple one. Two things are wrong here:

1. present-day music is not evolving from the complex to the simple, but from the atonal to the tonal.

2. atonal does not mean complicated, and tonal does not mean simple.
Friedrich's ‘Lulu’
Authors: Perle George
Published: February 2010

On 16 February the complete Lulu was heard in a live performance in Great Britain for the first time. It was heard, not seen. What was shown on the stage of the Royal Opera House was a farce by Götz Friedrich, superimposed on Alban Berg's music and libretto. Friedrich is an outstanding example of a type characterized by Arnold Schoenberg more than fifty years ago: ‘Producers who look at a work only in order to see how to make it into something quite different’. Operatic production today seems increasingly to be based on the assumption that composers—who are inept, naïve, and indifferent to the dramaturgical aspects of the operatic theatre—compose music in a vacuum which it is the producer's responsibility to fill. But the music of an opera is not composed in a vacuum. The productive aspects of the work—entrances, exits, lightings, groupings, curtains, movements, the very thoughts and feelings of the characters—have their correspondences in the music. This is what it means to compose an opera.
Composers of the World, De-Bow!
Authors: Keller Hans
Published: February 2010

The History of modern notation is the history of the stupefaction of our musical world which, enriched by an ever greater number of unmusical people (listeners, performers, and composers), has come to need a proportionate amount of superfluous information—superfluous, that is, for anybody who understands the music in the first place. Complex and problematic cases apart, Bach was still able to rely on our insight to the extent of letting the sheer structure of a piece dictate its tempo—whereas nowadays, the not so musical amongst us are unhappy without metronome marks, while the rest of us are unhappy about them. Again, Mozart's dynamics are extremely economical; many a dynamic change is firmly implied without being notated, and if we confined ourselves to his notated dynamics, an impossible, underplayed performance would be the result—which, in due journalistic course, would be described as ‘stylish’ by our critics.
Thoughts On The Late Works
Authors: Donat Misha
Published: February 2010

There can have been few composers of unmistakable greatness who achieved recognition so late in life as Roberto Gerhard. In the issue of The Score magazine which commemorated Gerhard's 60th birthday in 1956, the editor, William Glock, could write: ‘His works have been almost entirely ignored, with the result that 20th-century music has been robbed of the impact of one of its most vital representatives. The catalogue of his works shows that only four, comparatively minor, works of Roberto Gerhard have ever been printed. What it does not show, however, is the fact that many first performances have also been the last; and that, as far as England is concerned, only two or three of his major works have ever been heard in public’ Today, if Gerhard's true stature has still to be appreciated he can no longer be described as a neglected composer. Yet even now he is known almost exclusively for the music he wrote during his final decade. For in the 1960's, as if stimulated by his belated acclaim, the composer enjoyed a flood of creative activity, producing an extended series of works all of which display an extraordinarily unflagging energy and invention. Like a few great composers before him (one thinks particularly of Janáčcek, whose late music shows a similar exuberance), Gerhard wrote his most youthful music when already well past the age of sixty.
Some Thoughts on Matyas Seiber (1905–1960)
Authors: Silverman Julian
Published: February 2010

The history of 20th-century music can be seen as a series of more or less unsuccessful answers to—or evasions of—insoluble problems (due, in part, to the relative poverty of living musical traditions outside the concert hall and the felt inadequacy inside). From this point of view, it would be instructive for composers who are looking for new answers to build on the work of a figure like Matyas Seiber, who sought to master all the forms of music around him, to balance one with another and thus to open the way to new forms.
Stravinsky's ‘The Flood’
Authors: Payne Anthony
Published: February 2010

By now we are used to the tonal polarisation of Stravinsky's serial writing, but the resourcefulness with which he continues to throw fresh light on the method is amazing. In The Flood we have possibly the most overt example of his tonal twelve-note style so far, with what can be construed as an elaborate series of cadences on and around a final of C sharp. The five forms of the basic series shown in Ex. 1 illustrate what I mean, for they are used almost exclusively throughout the work. Taking the first and last notes in each case, we find a quasi tonal hierarchy outlined, with C sharp, its subdominant, dominant and supertonic. Significantly the form, O-F sharp and its retrograde which on these terms would have hinted at a flatter region are not so much in evidence. Even when cellular correspondences such as that which is obtained between notes 1–3 of O and I can be cited in justifying simultaneous presentation or continuation, we feel that considerations of cadence have really been uppermost in the composer's mind. Restriction to the five forms set out in Ex. 1 would of course have imposed too severe a discipline for a work lasting half an hour, and the way in which Stravinsky avails himself of variations is thoroughly typical. He does not utilise ‘enharmonic modulation’ by means of common cells : instead we find a standard permutation procedure in which notes 1 and 7 of a row become 6 and 12, or vice versa (Ex. 2). It is instructive that the particular forms chosen for permutation are frequently those which will yield the same cadential results as the forms shown in Ex. 1. Thus I-E as permutated in Ex. 2 is in its new form bounded by G sharp and C sharp, revealing affinities with O-G sharp as well as the more obvious I-G sharp (the shared final and almost identical shape). Ex. 3 shows one of the simpler uses of the permutation process for melodic variation and expansion. Here notes 6–12 of O-G sharp are followed by notes 6–12 of the substitute O-G sharp (permutated from O-C, with 6 and 12 becoming 1 and 7). He will also on occasion re-order to no particular plan beyond that of obtaining aural results which accord with the tonality of the stricter forms of this row.
Nicholas Maw's ‘One Man Show’
Authors: Payne Anthony
Published: February 2010

After the ‘Essay for Organ’, in which Maw found a satisfactory style from which he could build outwards to encompass serial and free atonal elements, with conjunct as well as fragmentary writing, he produced two works hinting at two different veins that might be tapped in his subsequent music. Of these the ‘Chamber Music’ combined an atonal harmony comparable with that of middle period Schoenberg, with his own cast of melody (sometimes a little Brittenish) in music that moved forward to a more or less traditional pulse; the vision presented here was serious but genial, and included a vein of affectionate parody. In ‘Scenes and Arias’ however we find a very different world in which a driving sexual energy coexists with dark expressionist poetry. The idiom in this work is of a richness in atonal harmony and texture that precludes a traditional forward movement, and static and dynamic passages combine to form a motion of considerable subtlety.
Stravinsky's Chords (I)
Authors: Hopkins G. W.
Published: February 2010

Vertical thought performs many and diverse functions in Stravinsky's music. This brief look at some of his harmonies is an attempt to find some examples of chords and harmonic technique which recur at different periods in his life. To try to isolate vertical sound from horizontal sense is a tricky procedure, but may be justifiable in the case of a composer who, in common with Ravel, frequently invites us to listen to his harmonies largely for their own sake. Analytical dismemberment in this sense can assist understanding of Stravinsky much more than it would do in the music of Sibelius, for instance. The precise purposefulness of Stravinsky's harmonies is one of the characteristics which distinguish his music from that of his imitators. In the main, it will be found that he has taken over the ‘classical’ function of dissonance (stress preceding resolution) and extended it in harness with rhythm. In this way, a harmonic stress is equated to a rhythmic stress. ‘Motoric’ rhythms being frequent in Stravinsky, there is only rarely an unambiguous resolution of stress. This is of course less true of works based on a pastiche style, in which the associational values of classical stress/resolution are relied on.
Stravinsky and the Piano
Authors: Ogdon John
Published: February 2010

Not only the piano music, but also the relatively unusual fact that Stravinsky composes at the piano, should concern us. It is noteworthy too that although Stravinsky's piano output is not very large, many of his orchestral works contain important concertante piano parts. That Petrushka and the Symphony in Three Movements were originally conceived as compositions for piano and orchestra, and then altered to their present form, perhaps represents a realisation on his part, prophetic at the time when Petrushka was composed, that the role of the piano as a solo instrument with orchestra could not remain in the same relationship to the orchestra, as protagonist, as had been the case in the nineteenth century.
Teaching With ‘Mikrokosmos’
Authors: Novik Ylda
Published: February 2010

In teaching Mikrokosmos to some four score children over a period of several years, I have realized that it serves numerous musical purposes beyond just that of being another series of pieces and studies for pupils. In addition to laying a strong and richly varied foundation for the understanding and performance of twentieth-century music, it presents almost unending varieties of situations for facilitating sight-reading and transposition. The work offers virtually every pianistic and musical problem to the student, and interestingly enough, its use gives him increased insight into music of the past as well as of the present.
Kodálya—A Personal View
Authors: Jolly Cynthia
Published: February 2010

Like many friends of Kodály, I find myself having to grapple with a sense of being stricken beyond comfort, and a warring disbelief that he is dead at all. Scattered all over the world is a body of people who have felt the personal magnetism of this extraordinary man, and whose lives have been radically changed as a result. Mátyás Seiber eloquently described the ‘peculiar, suggestive, compelling force that issues from him’, and how his teaching was invested with a touch of Buddhism, which forced his pupils to redeem themselves. That power is no less operative now that he is dead; it is if anything intensified, and people who have been aware of his standards find themselves impelled to take up the challenge that they represent.
Ginastera's ‘Bomarzo’
Authors: Urtubey Pola Suarez
Published: February 2010

In the uncertain panorama of today's music, few indeed are the composers who appear able to set their course as though by an infallible compass. Among those few, Alberto Ginastera is an outstanding example. During thirty years of professional life, his compositions reveal a progression of unbroken continuity and logic. When, therefore, in 1962 at the age of 46, he was commissioned by the Municipality of Buenos Aires to compose his first opera, Don Rodrigo, he was fully prepared for this major task, and created a lyrical and dramatic work in which all the elements of his creative personality are merged.
Documents of a Friendship with Ives
Authors: Carter Elliott
Published: February 2010

These letters and sketches of letters which the curator of the Ives Collection at Yale University, Mr. John Kirkpatrick, has been kind enough to allow us to copy give the history of a warm and inspiring friendship with Charles Ives. It started around 1924, when Mr. Clifton J. Furness, a music teacher at the Horace Mann High School in New York City, where I was a student, introduced me to him. From what I can remember, we went to Ives's house by Gramercy Park on a dark, rainy Sunday afternoon, and stepped into a cheery, old-fashioned interior, discussing excitedly modern music all afternoon. After this, I met Ives occasionally, sometimes when he invited me to join Mrs. Ives and him in their box at the Saturday afternoon Boston Symphony concerts at Carnegie Hall, or at Katherine Ruth Heyman's loft in a building that no longer exists, on Third Avenue and 10th Street huddling under the El, or later at his house on East 74th Street opposite the Mannes School.
Sorabji and the Computer
Authors: Rapoport Paul
Published: February 2010

This general dedication (a particular one to Hugh MacDiarmid precedes it) stands at the front of Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji's Opus clavicembalisticum as gates of warning to mere ordinary minds not to enter the edifice beyond. O.C. (for short) is a chiefly contrapuntal creation for piano solo, 248 large pages of music lasting nearly 3 hours, whose length is matched by its great difficulty, complexity, and intricacy of detail. Sorabji probably began it in 1929, with partial stimulus from Egon Petri's performances of Busoni's Fantasia contrappuntistica. That work seems to have been a structural model for O.C., although O.C. is no imitation of the Busoni, but a transcendent creative response to it.
Why I Write Music
Authors: Holloway Robin
Published: February 2010

The chief impulse comes from the emotions. Their fulfilment and their frustration are equally conducive to expression: what one has, one utters; what one lacks, one laments the lack of, or invents.
‘Cantata on the Death of God’ and ‘Clarissa’
Authors: Nash Peter Paul
Published: February 2010

These two large-scale works, both uncommissioned and still to be performed, were completed respectively in 1973 and 1976. It isn't surprising to find even that short three-year space to be deceptive: early sketches for Clarissa were going on at the same time as the composition of Cantata on the Death of God; and not only do they seem to have arisen from very similar preoccupations but they should provide, between them and individually, a telling illustration of some of Holloway's most basic intuitions and convictions.
Maxwell Davies's Piano Sonata
Authors: Griffiths Paul
Published: February 2010

Peter Maxwell Davies is not alone among contemporary composers in having changed his mind about tonality. Nor, indeed, is he the only one to have moved from an attempted serial extirpation of tonal harmony—the work he seems to be talking about in his 1959 article in The Listener is Prolation (1957–8)—to an ironic resumption of tonality in terms of quotation and parody, and thence to some kind of inner acceptance of tonality. But in Davies's case, quite unusually, the effect has been to make his music more complex as it becomes more whole, more challenging as it becomes superficially smoother: we are, of course, being warned of this in the second quotation above, which comes from a programme-note on the Second Symphony (1980), and it is not, after all, a new paradox to find music which is easy to follow but difficult to understand, though it might seem so after so much music that has been hard to follow but very easy to explain.
The Original Version of Bartok's Sonata for Solo Violin
Authors: Nordwall Ove
Published: February 2010

It is not widely known that the original version of Bartók's Sonata for solo violin differs in a number of details from the published edition, and in the finale significantly so. A complete list of the changes, which include many details such as bowings, fingerings, expression marks and caesuras, cannot be given here, nor would it serve any very valuable purpose, since the editing of the work for performance and publication by Menuhin, who had commissioned it, was done in close consultation with the composer. Some of the alternatives were indeed suggested by Bartók from the beginning, and were already jotted down on a spare half-page at the end of the manuscript when it was first sent to Menuhin. This is true, for instance, of the changes in the finale, although unlike most of the others, these, while arising out of considerations of practicability, are of very much more than mere practical importance. For the original text of the finale provides the most conspicuous example in all Bartók's works of the use of microtones.
Computer Applications to Bartók's Serbo-Croatian Material
Authors: Suchoff Benjamin
Published: February 2010

In the Introduction to his study of the Parry Collection of Yugoslav folk songs Béla Bartók contrasts ‘lexicographical’ and ‘grammatical’ principles in the systematic grouping of folk melodies. Although the former makes it possible to locate a melody by comparatively simple means, Bartók states, the latter is to be favoured; it is of higher importance “to get a clear idea of the relationship of melodies than to be able to locate them easily”. He then enumerates the components of his own grammatical system which, in order of weight, include: section structure, metric (syllabic) structure, rhythmical character, final notes of sections (caesurae), range, and so forth (cf. Plate 1 column headings).
Prokofieff: An Intimate Portrait
Authors: Moreux Serge
Published: February 2010

I was introduced to Serge Prokofieff in 1931. It was in Paris one evening when he came to conduct at the Salle Pleyel a festival of some of his symphonic works. In the diffused grey-green light of the foyer a tall man was standing, his arms crossed on his chest in what I later came to know as a characteristic attitude, with fingers gripping the elbows firmly. His face was in shadow as he had his back to the light. The shape of his head was oblong, solid and regular. His chest looked strong. I approached him from the side and as he turned towards me with liveliness I was struck by the extraordinary blue luminous clarity of a look that I shall never forget—one of those looks that a child gives you, that is so unusual and so moving in a grown man. In the years that followed I was to see this freshness, this transparent naïveté sometimes shadowed over, the pupils troubled like those of a boy who begins to ask himself what is beauty, or what is beyond it. But on this particular evening it was sparkling, because the concert had been an unqualified success. At the same time, for a fleeting moment, I noted in his face the reflection of that seriousness which is habitual when one is alone. It lasted for a tenth of a second; then an irresistible charm was born. Serge Prokofieff had begun to smile—that delightful smile which spreads across his mobile lips, a shade sensual, but scarcely deeper in colour than his fresh complexioned face.
Strauss and his Lieder: A Personal Reminiscence
Authors: Gerhardt Elena
Published: February 2010

It has given me great joy to accept the invitation to contribute to the Summer issue of TEMPO which is entirely devoted to Richard Strauss, on the occasion of the great Master's 85th birthday.
“Bluebeard's Castle”
Authors: Veress Sandor
Published: February 2010

Bartók's unique one-act opera lacks all that external stage-curiosity which was an essential part of the late nineteenth-century opera. He does not take over anything directly either from the German or from the Italian type of opera. Both in the musical and dramatic construction Bartók declines to use the well-known schemes. Almost nothing happens on the stage. Apart from some lighting effects, the tricky technical equipment of the modern stage is at a standstill during the performance of Bluebeard's Castle. One could very well imagine a performance of this work on the old Shakespearian stage in its complete simplicity, yet achieving the full effect of the opera. Actually, an abstract stage, concentrating on the essentials of the drama, would be the most suitable for this work.
British Festivals: Some Comments on their Customs
Authors: Mitchell Donald
Published: February 2010

In many ways Edinburgh is the most substantial, the most luxurious, the most opulent of British Festivals, yet not necessarily the most interesting or even the most significant. It is as well to remind ourselves that British Festivals did not begin with, and certainly do not end at Edinburgh. They have been characters on our musical stage for many years, although all too often they have disguised themselves with distressing reticence in the drabbest robes and made use of a property-box that has not caught up with the times. The Messiah might give way to a younger work now and again, if the suggestion were not considered revolutionary. A change round of the cast, a draft of new blood, is always refreshing, and indeed essential, if a festival is not to become a funeral. Charles Stuart, writing in TEMPO in the autumn of 1947, bemoaned the complacency of the Leeds Festival of that year and gave a list of the “Festival battle-horses”—Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Berlioz' Te Deum, Verdi's Requiem—which drew the cortège to its final resting place. The Leeds authorities seem to have realized the importance of a blood transfusion, and Mr. Stuart could not complain of the 1950 programme, which shows this Victorian infant (born in 1858) to be still of lusty and adventurous age and embarking on the second public performance in England of Britten's Spring Symphony, besides Honegger's rarely-heard King David, Rubbra's Morning Watch Motet, Strauss's Oboe Concerto and Vaughan Williams' Sixth Symphony.
Tanglewood After Ten Years
Authors: Hawkes Ralph
Published: February 2010

After many visits to Tanglewood during the years 1940 to 1949 one is finally driven to pose the question as to how far this great summer musical event may really be called a Festival.

I do not think that any extravagant claims have in fact been made for its being “a Festival,” and over the years that magnificent character in music, Dr. Serge Koussevitzky, has been at pains always to emphasize the “student” or “school” aspect of the undertaking of which he is, so to speak, the Alpha and Omega. One cannot begin to discuss Tanglewood without paying the deepest possible tribute to the very real work, effort and love that Dr. Koussevitzky has devoted to this, his child, for the benefit of musical America, young and old. There is no similar event anywhere else in the world—but then, one might say that there is no similar character anywhere else in the world who could in fact have engendered it. Yet after ten years one begins to feel that either the students have outgrown Tanglewood or that Tanglewood has out grown the students. In the opinion of this writer the latter is definitely the case.
Béla Bartók
Authors: Foldes Andor
Published: February 2010

If the criterion of taking a lesson is that you spend a predefined unit of time with a teacher who then gets paid, I never had a single lesson with Bartók. Yet I do feel very definitely that the many unforgettable sessions which I spent in his house at regular intervals throughout a long number of years, helped more to shape my musical personality and my character as an individual, than any lesson I had with any of my formal teachers.
The Magic Flute: Auden v. Dent
Authors: Cross Joan
Published: February 2010

It was surprising to discover that Professor E. J. Dent's English version of The Magic Flute has been in use in this country for thirty-five years or more. His version, made originally for Lilian Baylis's opera at the Old Vic in its semiamateur days, is familiar to all regular opera-goers here, for it has been in constant use since the opening of Sadler's Wells in 1930, and at the Royal Opera House since the establishment of National Opera there. Now, W. H. Auden, the librettist of The Rake's Progress and one of the foremost modern poets, has wandered into the thankless field of opera translation and the English version which comes from his hand and that of his collaborator, Chester Kallman, has already been used in a television performance of The Magic Flute in America on the occasion of the bi-centenary anniversary of Mozart's birth. It was much praised.
Kodály
Authors: Foldes Andor
Published: February 2010

Kodály once remarked to me—we were talking about prodigies—that “nothing a musician does before the age of eighteen matters—what counts, is what he achieves between eighteen and seventy-five.…” It's quite likely that Kodály came to this conclusion through his personal experiences.
Facts or Opinions
Authors: Raynor Henry
Published: February 2010

The Personal Column of The Times frequently offers employment to “Companions”. They are required to take a more or less obscure place in decent society without feeling awkward, to be gentle, amenable to the opinions of others and to make themselves useful and pleasant: they are also expected to be able to drive a car, for they are meant to cover the ground quickly. These were the ideals which those responsible for The Musical Companion set before themselves in 1934, and with such success that in twenty years their book ran through nineteen editions. Its major revision and expansion, containing 782 pages to its predecessor's 751, appeared in November, 1957. W. R. Anderson (The ABC of Music), Julius Harrison (The Orchestra), E. J. Dent (Opera), Dyneley Hussey and Francis Toye (The Human Voice), and Eric Blom (An Essay on Performance and Listening) have revised their contributions to the original volume. The essays by the late Edwin Evans and F. Bonavia (Chamber Music and The Solo Instrument) have been brought up-to-date and where possible revised by Colin Mason, who is twice left with the unenviable task of gathering up the fragments that remain, and provides the only reference in the book to some two dozen composers, among whom are Janáček, Seiber, Searle, Hartinann, Skalkottas and Dallapiccola. These composers are mentioned only by Mr. Mason. As it is in the nature of a book to have a hero, Mr. Mason is the hero of The New Musical Companion.
On Strawinsky's ‘Threni’
Authors: Pauli Hansjörg
Published: February 2010

To write at this very moment an article on Strawinsky's latest work is rather a difficult task. Like all those who write on music I have to choose between publishing a tough analysis or composing a vast introduction, a sort of guidebook. Unfortunately in the present case the former would make sense to me alone, since up to now practically nobody has had a chance to hear the piece played or to study the score; whereas the latter, alas, would make no sense at all. I shall have to try a third road and, despite Schoenberg's emphatic warning, adopt a middle course.
Britten's ‘Nocturne’
Authors: Holst Imogen
Published: February 2010

Britten's Nocturne for tenor and small orchestra was written during August and September 1958 and was first performed at the Leeds Festival on October 16th, with Peter Pears singing the solo and Rudolph Schwarz conducting. The first London performance, conducted by the composer, was given on January 30th, 1959, at Friends' House, Euston Road, as a tribute to the memory of the late Erwin Stein.
Ernest Newman (1868–1959)
Authors: Cooke Deryck
Published: February 2010

Ernest Newman devoted so much of his life to writing about Wagner that many people, the times being anti-Wagnerian, regarded him as a brilliant musical scholar who had unfortunately become limited by a fixed obsession. In his earlier days, he produced important studies of Gluck, Beethoven, Liszt, Strauss, and Wolf; but in later life he seemed to be interested only in one composer. Concerning his articles in The Sunday Times, someone concocted an amusing clerihew:

Next week, said Ernest Newman,

I shall write about Schumann;

But when next week came,

It was Wagner, just the same.
Bartók's ‘Four Pieces’ for Two Pianos
Authors: Waldbauer Ivan
Published: February 2010

The Second Suite, op. 4, for small orchestra will no doubt play an important role in any critical study of Bartók's musical style. Though his earlier music, too, reveals his striving to create a specifically Hungarian art-music, until the Second Suite his Hungarian inflections were, by his own testimony, of the popular nineteenth-century variety best exemplified by Liszt's Rhapsodies. In contrast, the Second Suite contains elements of genuine Hungarian peasant music. At the same time, it is his last and perhaps best composition still within the framework of the Brahms-Strauss-Liszt idiom.
Britten's New Opera: A Preview
Authors: Evans Peter
Published: February 2010

While Britten's only peer in English drama-through-music was probably unperturbed by a text which aped A Midsummer-Night's Dream without quoting a single line of Shakespeare, it is characteristic both of our time and of the man that Britten has worked on a text of almost formidable authenticity. The masterly abridgment and adaptation of the play, by the composer and Peter Pears, cannot concern us here, but it has helped to make possible highly integrated illuminations of some of the richest (and to a composer most hazardous) English verse. How Britten thrives on piquant juxtapositions of mood is a familiar wonder, but it is worth noting that the unity of (say) Winter Words is of a quite different order from that of the Nocturne: it is impossible to analyse musically what links the disconnected scenes into a coherent expression that is Hardy seen through Britten, whereas the common background of night and sleep imposes on poems from diverse sources a unity (not uniformity) of atmosphere that is naturally absorbed into the musical fabric. In the new opera, the three planes on which the fairies, the rustics and the lovers move demand radically differentiated musical idioms. The distinction is made absolute by numerous details, like Puck's spoken part (dancing takes over the interpretative role of melody) and Oberon's ‘supernatural’ casting as a countertenor, the tendencies towards a romantic Angst in the arioso of the lovers and towards a bucolic directness in the recitative of the rustics, and above all by orchestral identifications ranging from the wealth of percussion instruments associated with the supernaturals to the old trombone joke of the rustics' lion. We may regard this diversity as roughly analogous to that of the Hardy songs, with a composite meaning that is focussed in Shakespeare, but Britten also finds sources of intra-musical unity in the common backgrounds he draws to our notice, such as the Wood and Sleep.
Bartókiana
Authors: Weissmann John S.
Published: February 2010

Bartók was one of the giants of 20th century music. Yet the ‘Bartókiana’ associated with his life and works is of surprisingly modest dimensions. The fact that he has now been dead for fifteen years would tend to invalidate the possible excuse of an insufficient historical perspective. Admittedly, his life cannot be discussed with all its details completely filled in, but such is not the case with his music. None the less, his art, viewed in its totality, has not attracted the attention it unquestionably deserves: we are still baffled and mystified by certain aspects of his style and, to a slightly lesser extent, by facets of his technique.
Beecham in Seattle
Authors: Katims Virginia
Published: February 2010

Sir Thomas Beecham was deeply venerated in the United States, both for his musicianship and for his quick and acidulous sense of humour. Although music lovers everywhere attended his concerts knowing full well that they would hear a definitive and tasteful performance, one had the feeling too that much of his audience hopefully anticipated some kind of amusing explosion from the famous maestro.
Theories of Dancing
Authors: Squire W. H. Haddon
Published: February 2010

It is an odd fact that practically everything in what is called The Central-European School of Dance was derived from a French singer. Surprisingly little is known in England about this remarkable man, who, believing his work to be incomplete and susceptible of further development, refused to have it publicized in print. Passed from teacher to pupil his theories, like some ancient religion, have been preserved by oral transmission. He had three American pupils and from one of these, Henrietta Crane (Mrs. Richard Hovey), the American dancer, Shawn, acquired the method which he claims comes in a “direct stream from François Delsarte.” As in Germany, Delsarte provided a basis for the modern dance in America.
Chronicle of Exile
Authors: Reither Joseph
Published: February 2010

Rachmaninoff's popular fame as a composer was supported until the last few years of his life by a rough half dozen compositions comprising but a small fraction of his total output. A graceful compliment paid to Rachmaninoff the pianist by Arthur Rubinstein may partially account for this fact. In a recent radio interview Mr. Rubinstein explained the former infrequency of his performances of Rachmaninoff's music by confessing that while the composer lived he had felt somewhat reluctant to interpret music which Rachmaninoff himself presented with supreme authority. Other performers have been similarly affected by the sovereign authority of the composer as both pianist and conductor. When, in combination with this possibility, we recall Rachmaninoff's disinclination to charge his concert programmes too heavily with his own works, we have perhaps a partial explanation of why more of his compositions did not share the popularity of the few.
Some Contemporary Flemish Composers
Authors: Dille Denijs
Published: February 2010

“Do all of you here write such bad music?” Paul Hindemith asked me one evening a few years ago. We were wandering through the streets of Brussels, and he pointed to a poster which bore the name of a living academic composer, some of whose work it seems he had chanced to hear. I must admit that the music in question was not exactly calculated to convey to foreigners a favourable impression of our art. Let us say that it was perhaps better suited for home consumption, and so should not give rise to any general judgment: but the fact remains that Hindemith's question points to a state of affairs that is very detrimental to us. Our music is either in discredit or else it is unknown. And our modern composers suffer more from this than the others, because they seldom or never, even in their own country, get the chance to show what they are and what they stand for. They ought therefore to be grateful to Tempo for the opportunity here afforded to call them by name and focus attention on them. It goes without saying that we shall not give a complete panorama of Flemish music, since we are charged specifically to confine our attention to the moderns.
The Poetic Image—A Note on Britten's “Wedding Anthem”
Authors: Mitchell Donald
Published: February 2010

To make the point that Britten throughout his vocal works shows an astonishing mastery of words, and an extraordinary capacity for putting them to musical use, would be to labour the obvious and accepted. No one doubts his capabilities in this direction, and his operas and song-cycles are full of examples the apt beauty of which defy analysis; unless they are first felt by the listener they might as well go verbally unremarked and unrecognised. Nevertheless the Wedding Anthem, Op. 45, happens to provide a remarkable instance of Britten's understanding of the musical possibilities offered by the poetic image, an example the significance of which can be made clear by brief analysis and which may prove to be a useful guide when considering like aspects of Britten's style.
Delius's Operas
Authors: Hutchings Arthur
Published: February 2010

An otherwise valuable chapter in a German text-book on Musical Form is erroneously entitled “Logic and Coherence in Music,” for it deals only with treatments of motives and methods of reference; they alone cannot ensure logic and coherence, otherwise the sentence “Every thirty trees through a tuba are sweeter than a door” would be as logical and coherent as “Any two sides of a triangle are greater than a third” grammatically the sentences are identical. A story is told of Vaughan Williams's asking a candidate at Cambridge: “What do you mean by development?” After a silence, the answer was: “I don't really know,” to which R.V.W. rejoined: “Neither do I”! That motive reference is one important means of unifying an act or a whole opera, that it often offers a clue to the deeper integrity that defies analysis, and that it probably exists, used unconsciously or too subtly to be recognised, in works avoided by analysts, I do not deny. (It certainly exists in Boris Godunoff, yet Moussorgsky was at pains to avoid classical development, or Wagnerian Leitmotive machinery, or anything he considered a German stylization).
The Instrumental Music of Frederick Delius
Authors: Foss Hubert
Published: February 2010

The programme of the first concert of Delius's works, at the old St. James's Hall in May, 1899, contains little of instrumental music that is outstanding. There are some rarely beautiful songs, there is a remarkable selection from the opera Koanga; but of the instrumental works only one remains which we sometimes hear still performed today. Over the Hills and Far Away is a characteristic and indeed beautiful piece, and were it to stand alone would arouse the interest and admiration of perceptive students; for us its interest is in part historical, as the earliest essay in Delius's mature style, in part aesthetic as something like an elaborated sketch for the greater works that were to follow during the ensuing twenty years. That same year, 1899, on the other hand, itself produced the first of the later masterpieces—Paris.
Igor Strawinsky: “Cantata”
Authors: Lindlar Heinrich
Published: February 2010

Faced with his latest composition—Cantata, finished in 1952—persistent opponents of Strawinsky will probably again speak in terms of the “funeral baked meats of former styles,” especially as this time the baked meats, both literary and musical, bear an early Elizabethan label—an Elizabethanism, of course, to which Strawinsky has given (as always) a subtle modern twist.
Some Reflections on Gloriana
Authors: Klein John W.
Published: February 2010

Occasionally, in the history of operatic art, great works, with no pronounced revolutionary tendencies, yet models of simplicity, of sincerity, of artistic integrity, have been subjected to the most savage criticism, as unintelligent as it was undiscerning. We remain astounded at the lack of insight, of common-sense on the part of cultured critics. Even la Traviata was held up for censure as “prurient, foul and hideous”; whereas, in the whole of Verdi's work, there is nothing more poignant and sublime than Violetta's appeal: “Dite alia giovane.” Carmen was stigmatized as “grossly vulgar and vile,” whilst Vincent d'Indy—amazed at the aberrations of men—sadly remarked that the “music seemed crazy to nearly everybody.”