bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Itinerant Musician (1746–1750)
Authors: Howard Patricia
Published: November 2023

For more than a year following his two London concerts in April 1746, Gluck again disappears from view. The pasticcio devised by Maccari for Venice in 1744 enjoyed a new lease of life: La finta schiava, containing at least two arias by Gluck, was performed by Angelo Mingotti’s travelling opera company in Graz during the Carnival season of 1746, in Prague later in the same spring, and in Leipzig on II May 1746, but we cannot assume that Gluck was present at any of these performances.1 He may have journeyed directly from London to Hamburg and there joined the company of Angelo’s brother Pietro Mingotti, whose troupe he could have encountered at the coronation of Francis I in Frankfurt the previous September.2
The Travelling Composer (1774–1775)
Authors: Howard Patricia
Published: November 2023

You will find enclosed, honoured Sir, a musical drama, a first reading of which will doubtless displease you. Please be so good as to allow me, therefore, to explain something of its purpose.
Armide (1777–1778)
Authors: Howard Patricia
Published: November 2023

Immediately upon his arrival in France, Gluck was admitted to the queen’s chamber, and throughout the time he remained there, she did not cease talking to him. One day, she asked him if he was near to finishing his tragic opera Armide, and if he was satisfied with it. Gluck answered her very coldly, in his German accent, ‘Madame, it will soon be finished, and it will be truly superb.’
Haydn’s Symphonic Forms
Authors: Haimo Ethan
Published: November 2023

Haydn never discussed his compositional ideas in much detail, either in the interviews he gave to an early biographer or in his surviving correspondence. Moreover, relatively few sketches of his compositions have been preserved. Therefore, attempts to reconstruct Haydn’s compositional thought, and in particular his formal logic, must rely on evidence drawn from close analyses of the works themselves. Using his symphonies as its subject, this book attempts to clarify what Haydn’s fundamental principles of formal logic might have been. It shows how Haydn employed those basic compositional principles to structure his forms, providing explanations that account for specific details of individual movements as well as the relationships between the movements. Beyond what they show about Haydn’s formal thought and the individual works discussed, the analyses in this book also have a larger purpose: to argue in support of the idea that compositions cannot be analysed in a meaningful manner if the analysis is divorced from the work’s historical context.
Handel’s Muse
Authors: Hurley David Ross
Published: November 2023

Handel's frequent and extensive alterations to his scores yield much valuable information on musical and extra-musical matters. This book represents the most thorough study to date of Handel's compositional procedures in his English oratorios and musical dramas. David Hurley examines six major works composed between 1743 and 1751 (Semele, Hercules, Belshazzar, Solomon, Susanna, and Jephtha), explores changes in the autograph scores, and, where possible, traces the progress of musical ideas from sketches and/or borrowings through drafts to the first performance version. By studying recurring types of revisions, Hurley identifies Handel's regular musical concerns while also addressing changes arising from specific dramatic situations. The later chapters of the book offer fresh insight into the relationship between music and text, evaluating for the first time the role of word painting in Handel's compositional process and furthering our knowledge about Handel's interactions with librettists and singers during the oratorio years.
The Ecclesiastical Settlement and the 1662 Book of Common Prayer
Authors: Wilson Ruth M
Published: November 2023

The reinstatement of the Church of England coincided with the return of the king in 1660. This singular dramatic episode did not, however, bring with it immediate consolidation of episcopal government and instantaneous restoration of traditional liturgical practice. Even so, the relatively rapid progress of these events belies the century of tumultuous religious change which preceded the abolition of the monarchy and the state church in the early 1640s. The sixteenth-century Reformation, Catholic reaction, and Elizabethan settlement were the prelude to a period of growth in the union of church and state during the early Stuart years.
Chants and Chanting in Parish Churches c.1710-1820
Authors: Wilson Ruth M
Published: November 2023

The musical performance of responses, prose psalms, and canticles in parishes was part of a wider reform movement in parish music. While the revitalization of congregational psalm-singing was its initial aim, the formation of choirs and the performance of more elaborate music soon followed. The new personal prosperity fostered by a thriving commercial economy in the eighteenth century contributed directly to the movement to improve the standard of church music, especially in London and outlying market towns. An important aid to reform in town churches was the installation of an organ, obtained through a subscription or donated by a parishioner of means, for whom an organ was an impressive and visible sign of wealth, and of a generous public conscience. The growth of charity schools was another important aspect of the changes in town church music. The children were taught to sing as part of their general education and eventually took their places in the choir for Sunday services. Special music was composed for the annual charity sermon at which the children sang to help raise funds for the school.
Per Retro et Recte
Authors: Wilson Ruth M
Published: November 2023

Within this broad outline, the history of Anglican chant and chanting takes shape, from its roots in the pre-Reformation Latin rite to the early nineteenth century. The essentially unbroken development of liturgical practice in the English liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer has continued under the aegis of the ‘one use’, which replaced the complex ritual of the pre-Reformation Latin Offices and Mass. The ‘one use’, however, did not establish uniformity in interpretation of the rubrics of the Common Prayer across the spectrum of institutions subsumed under the jurisdiction of the national church. The performance of the same liturgy varied historically from parish to cathedral to collegiate chapel and church, and from town to country and south to north.
Storm and stress (1853-60)
Authors: MacDonald Malcolm
Published: November 2023

Brahms and Joachim learned of Schumann’s suicide attempt from a newspaper report. Appalled, they wrote to Dietrich for news: but without waiting for an answer, Brahms hurried to Düsseldorf on 3 March and announced to Clara Schumann that he was there to help her and her six children in any way he could. ‘She wept a great deal,’ he reported to Joachim, ‘but was very glad to see me’. His action was both practical and characteristic: whereas Joachim, Grimm, or Dietrich had their professional commitments, he was practically a free agent. He was also Romantic, quixotic, and aware of an especially deep personal obligation. For the next three years he was seldom far from Clara Schumann’s side.
Not quite a Viennese (1860-72)
Authors: MacDonald Malcolm
Published: November 2023

Shortly after the ‘Manifesto’ episode Brahms attended the Rhine Music Festival in Düsseldorf, taking three of the girls from the Frauenchor to sing vocal quartets with Clara Schumann. Proceeding afterwards to Bonn with Joachim for the baptism of Dietrich’s first child, he encountered the young Fritz Simrock, junior partner in the Bonn-Berlin music publishing firm of N. Simrock. As a direct result of this meeting Simrock published Brahms’s A major Serenade, the op. 17 partsongs, and the recently completed B flat major Sextet.
The music of the middle years, 1860-75
Authors: MacDonald Malcolm
Published: November 2023

Brahms’s music does not easily group itself into ‘periods’. The lineaments of his style were foreshadowed in the first years of his compositional activity, and were not subject to abrupt change. Even his earliest music has such strength of character and technical command that it is difficult to speak of immaturity giving way to maturity. There is, certainly, a gradual development by which ever more thorough mastery of the essentials of his craft led to an ever closer match of means and manner with expression; to a deepening profundity; and to the ability to say more and more with fewer and fewer notes. But this was by no means as easy for Brahms as it now looks to us, and it was achieved only by unremitting hard work.
‘Frei aber froh’
Authors: MacDonald Malcolm
Published: November 2023

Brahms had not long returned from Hamburg before he was offered the post, in succession to Anton Rubinstein, of artistic adviser and conductor to the Gesell schaft der Musikfreunde, with the promise of a large salary and a completely free hand in programming. After his customary period of hesitation he accepted, taking up the duties in the autumn of 1872. It was the last, and most prestigious, of the few official positions he held during his career. He now had access to the finest choir in Vienna, 300 strong, and a full symphony orchestra of a higher professional standard than had been available to the Singakademie.
1809–24
Authors: Radcliffe Philip
Published: November 2023

If the life of Mendelssohn is set beside those of most great composers, its most striking feature is its comparative ease and luxuriousness. Inevitably this has affected estimates of him both as a man and as a composer, but not always in the same direction. For many years the fact that he was not one of those wild, difficult bohemians, but a pleasant-mannered, cultured gentleman, undoubtedly endeared him to a very large section of society, especially in England. Handel had been a great public figure, but. of a formidably volcanic disposition, with few intimate friends; Mendelssohn they could regard more as one of themselves, and they could find in his music a reflection of his personal charm and geniality. From this attitude of instinctive, uncritical affection there was bound to be a reaction his charm was thought to be a symptom of superficiality and his cultured and luxurious environment to have led merely to sluggishness and complacence.
1834–7
Authors: Radcliffe Philip
Published: November 2023

Felix went to Diisseldorf determined to raise the standard in both ecclesiastical and theatrical music, but, as so often happens to reformers, he soon found more difficulties than he had expected. He first turned his attention to the church music, deciding that ‘no appropriate epithet exists for the music which has hitherto been given here’. He introduced works by Palestrina, Leo, Lassus and others. This was not particularly well received by the citizens of Diisseldorf, but worse was to follow. At the theatre he announced a series of ‘classical’ performances, beginning with Don Giovanni; this involved a raising of the prices, and there were disturbances on the first night. Felix insisted on a public apology, which was eventually made, and for a time things ran smoothly.
Personality and influence
Authors: Radcliffe Philip
Published: November 2023

The epoch for expansion and extended analysis has passed away: the novelties of knotty points and subtle analogies are undesired: we want strong emotion, but it must be concentrated; it must smite, sudden as the electric fluid, it must draw blood. And this is Mendelssohn. That Mendelssohn possessed a natural vein of such rich, flowing melody as Mozart and Beethoven commanded, cannot be claimed for him. Yet as a melodist he has been misunderstood and undervalued in no common degree—the fate, by the way, of every composer who is more than a mere melodist. Those who have passed hasty judgment-on him as ‘dry’ have done so rather on the strength of some one work that does not suit their humour than on the bulk of his writings.
Lisztomania (1839-47)
Authors: Watson Derek
Published: November 2023

Liszt’s Glanzperiode, when the term ‘Lisztomania’ was coined by Heine, conjures up images of him that have remained most to the fore in popular imagination. A dazzling wizard, a showman and superman of the keyboard who thrilled audiences in musical capitals and far flung regions of Europe and whose works matched the glitter and even the vulgarity of that era of hysterical adulation.
Weimar (1848-61)
Authors: Watson Derek
Published: November 2023

Carolyne lwanowska was born in 1819 at Monasterzyska in the Ukraine, the only child of an immensely rich Polish couple. From the start her life was eccentric. Her mother preferred to live abroad and her father gave her free rein to keep her own hours, to eat when she liked, to ride her horses over the wild plains. She acquired an early addiction to cigars, a voracious appetite for reading and a deep (Roman Catholic) religiosity which in later years bordered on mania. In 1836 she wed Prince Nicholas von Sayn Wittgenstein (1812--64), an army officer of modest means and a member of a Russian branch of a Westphalian family of that name. Nicholas and Carolyne produced one child, Marie Pauline Antoinette (1837-1920), and they separated a few years after their marriage. The princess then led an isolated, unorthodox life on the estates she had inherited and was twenty-eight when she first met Liszt.
L’Abbe Liszt (1861-8)
Authors: Watson Derek
Published: November 2023

Weimar, for all its exertions, was a conscious withdrawal from the world, so that the world would come to Weimar. Rome was a further withdrawal as Liszt played little part in public musical life (outside the Church), even discouraged performances of his works, and regarded his stay in the city as the third part, and probably the close, of his life. Prior to settling into this voluntary but by no means idle retirement, he went to Paris and enjoyed a whirl of brilliant society, calling on old friends and viewing his visit as a sort of St Martin’s summer. Returning to Weimar, a final festival was held at which most of his comrades-in-art gathered and much of his music was heard. These events had a valedictory air, as if he was consciously and forever renouncing the scenes of his triumphs of youth and middle age.
Une vie trifurquee (1869-86)
Authors: Watson Derek
Published: November 2023

Twilight, an ambiguous word, might be the heading of this chapter as the last phase of Liszt’s career was both a dusk and a dawn. The image of twilight suggests transition, and in the works of the late years there are many glimmerings of hitherto unexplored paths in music. He did not found a new ‘school’ with this music but many twentieth-century techniques and styles can be found prefigured in his music after 1870. His search for new images of musical expression was lifelong, but a peculiarly intermediate, transitional character hangs over his last period. Some of these twilight creations remained in shadowy obscurity until the second half of the present century.
Original piano music
Authors: Watson Derek
Published: November 2023

Three works published in Paris in 1824-5 were principally designed to show Liszt’s grasp of keyboard technique: Allegro di bravura (of which he sketched an orchestral arrangement), Rondo di bravura and Huit Variations. They are otherwise of no great value except for signs that show the young composer’s already wideranging sense of tonality and harmonic adventure. The Allegro, which has an improvisatory quality, is particularly restless in key: its 37-bar slow introduction encompasses E flat minor, G flat major, D flat minor, D major, D minor and again E flat minor, before reaching E flat major, the home key of the work. And in the Rondo some harmonic touches are quite untamed.
Selective Repertoire
Authors: Ferguson Howard
Published: November 2023

‘Hornpipe’ (one of three untitled pieces written by ‘John Alcestur’ on blank pages of the Evesham Abbey Bible (The Byble, trans. by Thomas Matthew, Antwerp 1539; Almonry Museum, Evesham). Alcester was sac ristan of the Abbey before its dissolution in January 1540.
Sounding Icons
Authors: Hillier Paul
Published: November 2023

All music emerges from silence, to which sooner or later it must return. At its simplest we may conceive of music as the relationship between sounds and the silence that surrounds them. Yet silence is an imaginary state in which all sounds are absent, akin perhaps to the infinity of time and space that surrounds us. We cannot ever hear utter silence, nor can we fully imagine such concepts as infinity and eternity. When we create music, we express life. But the source of music is silence, which is the ground of our musical being, the fundamental note of life. How we live depends on our relationship with death; how we make music depends on our relationship with silence.
Serialism/Collage
Authors: Hillier Paul
Published: November 2023

Throughout the 1960s, from Nekrolog to Credo, Pұrt followed a distinctly personal path through the twists and turns of what we have now learned to call ‘modernism’. Inevitably this period in his life has been discounted as ‘the other’, as the obverse of what he has since become famous for. Our view of this music, which has been lumped together as that of his ‘serial period’, has been distorted by somewhat superficial observation by writers hastening on to the richer pastures of the tintinnabuli music itself. Perhaps they should not be blamed for doing this; to a certain degree they have been encouraged by Part’s own disavowal of the earlier style (not, however, of the actual pieces), to which must be added the foreshortening perspective of hindsight, reinforced by the clearly demarcated zones of tonal and serial languages.
Performance Practice
Authors: Hillier Paul
Published: November 2023

This chapter is addressed primarily to performers of Part’s music, though as I subscribe to the view that the most profound commentary on or analysis of any piece of music ultimately resides in a good performance of it, its raison d’etre is hardly a minor one. But of course the kind of language in which we seek to discuss the nuances of performance is even more hopelessly inexact than that employed for the more theoretical aspects of music. Accordingly, the chapter is a short one, and I have allowed myself a greater licence for what is, inevitably, personal opinion rather than verifiable fact.
Introduction: Steps towards Analysis
Authors: Cook Nicholas
Published: November 2023

One conclusion seems to be insistent.’ writes Roger Parker towards the end of his article ‘Verdi through the Looking-Glass’. ‘It is that ... we can espouse no “ideal” way in which words and music will make drama together, and that we should be careful not to approach the issue with unconscious a priori assumptions.’ 1 As I tried to show in Chapter 3-and the point applies to multimedia in general, not just to opera-the traditional language for analysing the interaction of different media is thoroughly entangled with prescription, implicit valuejudgement, and unsupported generalization. One of the points of having a relatively standardized vocabulary for the description of cross-media relationships is that it makes it possible to reverse this process, so prising description apart from prescription.
Credit Where It’s Due: Madonna’s ‘Material Girl’
Authors: Cook Nicholas
Published: November 2023

Dating from 1985 and directed by Mary Lambert.Madonna’s video ‘Material Girl’ quickly became something of a critical cause celebreOn the one hand, it was instrumental in establishing Madonna’s media image as the representative of a new kind of feminism-one that combined the most traditional of feminine charms with a quite untraditional kind of independence. On the other, it played a major role in establishing Madonna’s reputation in the academic world as the representative of an equally new kind of post-modernism; she was seen as an artist who composed with images and identities in almost the way that traditional musicians composed with tunes and harmonies. The result is that ‘Material Girl’ has become one of the most highly theorized of all music videos.
The Melodrama and Other Works
Authors: Stockigt Janice B
Published: November 2023

During the early years of the 1720s Zelenka composed three musical cycles: six sonatas (ZWV 181), six Lamentationes pro hebdomada sancta (ZWV 53), and twenty-seven Responsoria pro hebdomada sancta (ZWV 55) –works now regarded as forming landmarks in his compositional career. In addition to this trio, the most important works written during the five years following his return to Dresden comprise all remaining instrumental compositions (except for the Capriccio of 1729, ZWV 190), Missa Sancti Spiritus of 1723 (ZWV 4), and music for a Jesuit drama, Sub olea pacis: Melodrama de Sancto Wenceslao (ZWV 175).
U
Authors: Clinkscale Martha Novak , Watson John R
Published: November 2023

Uebel (Ubel), Carl. Piano maker in Heilbronn, Germany, c.1860. The later partnership of Uebel &Lechletter was established in 1871 in Heilbronn and was still in existence in 1981. (Pierce/ATLAS) See Kulmbach, (Martin Friedrich) Ludwig.
The Music, 1711-19
Authors: Burrows Donald
Published: November 2023

The Deficiences I found, or thought I found, in such Italian 0PERA’s as have hitherto been introduc’d among us, were, First; That they had been compos’d for Tastes and Voices, different from those who were to sing and hear them on the English Stage; And Secondly, That wanting the Machines and Decorations, which bestow so great a Beauty on their Appearance, they have been heard and seen to very considerable Disadvantage.
The Transitional Decade II: Confusion, 1737-41
Authors: Burrows Donald
Published: November 2023

Handel’s programmes at Covent Garden had made a significant move towards an English repertory during March-April 1735 and in the early months of 1736, but that proved to be only temporary: the English-based cast of 1736 naturally required an English-based programme, but it is very unlikely that Handel foresaw at the time that his long-term future would lie with an English repertory.
Introduction
Authors: Bazzana Kevin
Published: November 2023

The Canadian Pianist, broadcaster, writer, and composer Glenn Herbert Gould was born in Toronto on 25 September 1932. (The family’s original, surname, Gold, was changed in 1939 or 1940.1) He was found to have perfect pitch at the age of 3, and other unusual musical talents-a photographic memory, gifts for sight-reading and improvisation-soon became apparent. Both his parents were amateur musicians, and until the age of 10 he studied the piano with his mother.
Aesthetics and Repertoire
Authors: Bazzana Kevin
Published: November 2023

The Most Basic premiss of Gould’s aesthetic was that music is primarily mental and only secondarily physical-that sound is a medium for the transmission of music but not a necessary, defining aspect of music itself For Gould a musical work was an abstract entity that could be fully comprehended in the mind in the absence of performance, without even the recollection of sounds or of physical means of production. A musical work thus existed beyond the sensory experience of it.
Counterpoint
Authors: Bazzana Kevin
Published: November 2023

Counterpoint Was One of the most important factors in Gould’s musical thought. It was crucial to his musical judgements, and he was renowned for his ability to clarify contrapuntal textures at the keyboard. He told Humphrey Burton in 1966 that he had ‘an inordinate fondness for all music that is in the least contrapuntal’,1 and throughout his career he made comments to the effect that his interest in a piece of music depended greatly on the degree to which it was contrapuntal. For Gould, musical craftsmanship was almost synonymous with the development of musical material in a contrapuntal setting.
Introduction
Authors: Kirkman Andrew , Slavin Dennis
Published: November 2023

Though most of it had long been available in various old editions, the bringing together of Binchois’s complete sacred music was the source of many surprises. First among these was the sheer bulk of the composer’s sacred oeuvre, which, as now became obvious, considerably outweighed that of his surviving secular output. The emphasis hitherto accorded to Binchois the composer of songs suddenly seemed disproportionate. But the surprises only multiplied through awareness of the wide diversity of styles and idioms encompassed by the various genres, sacred and secular, in which he worked. On its own, Binchois’s oeuvre presents an image which to modern perceptions—particularly when compared with the surviving output of his most celebrated contemporary, Dufay—appears paradoxical. If Binchois had a musical ‘personality’, that personality was split, it would appear, in different and unrelated directions. The familiar modern process whereby an image of the ‘author’ is constructed as it were in retrospect from a notional consistency in his or her surviving products seems in his case closed for us.
After Burgundy: Rethinking Binchois’s Years in Soignies
Authors: Gallagher Sean
Published: November 2023

Small cities sometimes vanish. Even while continuing to exist for cartographers and census officials, they disappear from the landscape of history Such has tended to be the case (at least in histories of music) with Soignies, the town where Binchois spent most ofhis last decade as provost of the collegiate church of Saint-Vincent. His move to Soignies in 1453 marked the end of his formal service to the duke of Burgundy, and perhaps also his career as a composer. The absence of works by Binchois securely datable to the 1450s, combined with his occupying a position at Saint-Vincent not directly related to music, has led to a view of the composer’s last years as musically inactive. At the same time, recent research by David Fallows has demonstrated that Saint-Vincent could hardly have been a musical backwater.
Binchois and the Poets
Authors: Fallows David
Published: November 2023

There are many reasons why some people are moving away from the kind of musicology that gathers information, sorts it, probes it, and tries to understand it in its own terms. But one reason is that new details have a nasty way of turning up just too late to be included. And one reason for that is obvious: bibliographical aids are now good enough to make it quite easy to locate the directly relevant material. It is only when you have read the last proofs that you turn to other matters and happen on something that could or should have been included.
Binchois’s Songs in the Feo Belcari Manuscript
Authors: Nosow Robert
Published: November 2023

In the humble fifteenth-century genre of Florentine lauda poetry, the name of Feo Belcari (1410—84) stands pre-eminent. One encounters his verse in virtually every Florentine laudario from the secondo Quattrocento. As early as 1833, the Accademia della Crusca edition of Belcari’s sacre rappresentazioni, or sacred plays, recognized the manuscript Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Magliabechi VII.690 as the single most authoritative source for his laude and rappresentazioni. Yet the manuscript has never been fully studied, either by musicologists or literary scholars.
Dictionary
Authors: Clive Peter
Published: November 2023

Adamberger, Antonie (b. Vienna, 31 December 1790; d. Vienna, 25 December 1867). Actress and singer; daughter of the tenor Johann Valentin Adamberger (1740/3-1804), the original Belmonte in Mozart’s Die Eniführung aus dem Serail, and of the actress and singer Maria Anna Adamberger, nee Ja(c)quet (1752-1804). Antonie made her debut at the Burgtheater as Antonia in Heinrich von Collin’s* Der gestörte Abschied on 22 February 1804, and was a full-time member of the company from 1807 to 1817.
Leonard Bernstein’s Kaddish
Authors: Schiller David M
Published: November 2023

This chapter, on Leonard Bernstein’s Symphony No. 3, Kaddish, has two sections. The first section begins with Bernstein’s self-conscious awareness of his own silence during the Holocaust. It explores how his struggle with assimilation frames the silence and also how this struggle finds increasingly confident creative expression, culminating with the composition of Kaddish. The second section analyses Kaddish as a post-Holocaust symphony, a delayed but clearly recognizable response to what Bernstein himself characterizes as the trauma of the Holocaust. The reception of Kaddish, taken up in the Conclusion, reflects the ‘turn inward’ of American Jews in the 1960s and marks the boundary of this study.
Introduction And Chronology
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

Britten’s writings in this period are unlike anything he later penned. Unbridled by lasting fame and public expectations, and buoyed by his well-developed sense of ambition and destiny, his essays attack any number of shibboleths and errant knights. In this, of course, if Auden was not always standing at Britten’s shoulder, he was at least sharpening his pencil. Even when American domicile and war had intervened, when Britten’s absence from England provoked censure and outrage in bodies ranging from the Royal Philharmonic to the Musical Times, when his artistic colleagues Auden and Isherwood were under fire in the Spectator and the House of Commons, he kept up his attack on the musical and political complacency of the country he had left behind. His defence of Mahler (Essay rn) is on one level a remarkably prescient piece about a composer whose true worth would really only be discovered once the LP record had eclipsed its short-breathed predecessor in the early 1950s, but on quite another level it is an attack on English concert programming, on the narrow-minded subscription to a symphonic canon defined to a large extent by Brahms’s death in 1897. To Britten, those who sought a broader definition, such as the BBC’s Edward Clark (Essay 2, the second of four essays written by the jobbing composer to supplement his meagre income), were fighting the same battle that he and his fellow artists (more commonly writers than musicians) were fighting. His piece on ‘England and the Folk-Art Problem’ (Essay 8) draws battle lines-admittedly not of his own authorship (English pastoralists had long been slogging it out with Teutonic infiltrators)-which he fervently believed would define the future of British music. Moreover, the Auden poem quoted at the end of the article represents Britten’s artistic creed in this period:
Wireless Concerts lose Edward Clarke (1936)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

News comes that Edward Clarke [sic] has left the B.B.C.1 The bold scope and high standard of the Contemporary Concerts have been largely due to his perseverance. Both listeners and the B.B.C. music department will regret his going. The most important music broadcasts announced for May are Alban Berg’s violin concerto, completed shortly before his death last year, and Vladimir Vogel’s i¾lgadu, a work for chorus and small orchestra. The Berg is scheduled for May 1st, and the Vogel for May 16th. The month’s music will also include relays from Covent Garden opera house. The season opens on April 27th with Die Meistersinger. This will be broadcast in its entirety, a procedure almost unprecedented for the B.B.C. The Berg concerto will be played by Krasner2 and conducted by Anton von Webern, himself a composer and close friend of Berg during his lifetime.3 Von Webern’s series of Workers’ Concerts in Vienna drew crowded houses, and won him wide fame as a conductor. Vladimir Vogel, Russian composer living in Switzerland, is best known for his fine Storm March for brass, and for two rhythmic studies for orchestra. The choral writing of Wagadu is said to be difficult to a degree of virtuosity. It is a pity that no room has been found for novelties in this season’s opera. Practical difficulties may bar the production of Berg’s i-¼zzeck, but means surely exist for the staging of Shostakovitch’s Lady Macbeth. The broadcast of this work in March stirred up interest and discussion in many musical quarters. Why should Weinberger’s delightful Schwanda be dropped when, with a little nursing, it might deservedly become a popular favourite?
The Rape of Lucretia (1946)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

Sir, Two leading members of the Arts Council have now stated that Glyndebourne is ‘lending’ or ‘letting’ its opera house for the production of The Rape of Lucretia. This is a complete misrepresentation of facts. When some eight months ago the Glyndebourne management became aware of my plans for opera I was approached by Mr. Bing, Glyndebourne’s general manager, and was offered the production of my new opera at Glyndebourne for the reopening of the Glyndebourne festival-an offer which I gladly accepted. The engagement of all artistic personnel, and the whole organization of the production, carried out in closest collaboration and agreement with myself, was and is in the hands of the Glyndebourne management, who are presenting the opera and are financially and otherwise solely responsible for it. The purpose of this letter is to inform the Arts Council, who from the start were asked to collaborate, and those who may be interested in the vicissitudes of English opera of the facts.
The Artist and his Medium: Composer and Listener (1946)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

I expect most of you have read about composers of the past and know something about the kind of lives they lived. You will have noticed how in each country and in each period these lives varied-how some composers were attached to courts and their works were written to order to please the taste of their rich patrons; how some were attached to famous churches and had to compose cantatas each week to fit the calendar of church festivals; how some were attached to theatres and had to produce operas to the taste of the theatre directors. If you feel that such harnessing of the creative vision is all wrong just let me remind you that these systems produced such giants as Bach, Haydn and Mozart. Perhaps also you have noticed that in the 19th century another kind of composer sprang up, who was more independent and composed music to please himself only and who sometimes, as a result of this, had a very hard life and often chose to starve in a garret rather than pander to the whims and fancies of other people. The 19th century also produced great composers. I should like to talk to you this morning about the kind of life the composer leads in the 20th century so that you can compare this with the lives of earlier composers.
The Arts Council and Opera (1950)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

POOLEY: What we are trying to do, Mr. Britten, is to make up our minds what are the real requirements in regard to opera and ballet during the next five years, and what funds will be needed to sustain them on the basis of building up a national opera and a national ballet. Those requirements will then be put before the Arts Council, and they will put them before the Treasury, and we shall see what happens. We have asked a number of people to consult with us, and it is very nice of your [sic] to come this morning. We would, of course, like to hear anything that you wish to say, but what we are especially interested in is the English Opera Group, which you largely founded and of which you are now the mainstay. BRITTEN: More or less, I should like to say; because at the beginning, since we had to found a new style, my task was greater than I hope it will be in the future. Until one established a style such as this, other composers will not write for it, but now, happily, other composers are writing for it, and so I think my part in it will probably be less in the future than it has been in the past.
The Rise of English Opera (1951)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

I welcome this finely detailed study of English Opera. English opera always seems to me, perhaps too hopefully, the Cinderella of the arts. This book makes it quite clear why the poor girl is having to wait so long for her handsome Prince. The three things English opera needs, as does any opera, are business organisation (including cash), public goodwill, and composers to write new operas. Never yet in this country have these three things coincided. Mr. White describes the launching of many admirable enterprises, good teams of singers engaged (there always seems to be good material available if not the good artistic direction to develop it)-and then the public response fails.1 We read of good composers with exciting ideas for operas-and the backers are not impressed. And we read of flourishing seasons failing, because there are no new operas. It makes gloomy if fascinating reading! But why should anyone mind?-who cares if there is English opera? We are told so often that Italian and German, even Russian and French, opera is superior to ours (true, in spite of Dido and Aeneas), and people have been known to say that the English language is ugly when sung (quite untrue, although it is more difficult to manage than, say, Italian). All the same, if we continue to perform opera, and to perform it in a language that most of the audience does not understand, one of the essentials of opera is lost. It is not enough to know roughly what is happening at a particular moment; if one thinks with what infinite precision a Mozart or a Verdi points the smallest word or tiniest shade of emotion, that will be clear. For this reason I am an unrepentant supporter of the regular seasons of opera in England being sung in English. But, however brilliant the translators’ work may be, obviously it is not ideal; the composers’ prosody must necessarily suffer, and the character of the opera change.
Serenade, for Tenor, Horn and Strings (1954)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

SIR,Your review of the new Decca recording of my SERENADE FOR TENOR, HORN AND STRINGS has recently been shown to me. I should like, if you will allow me, to make a comment on it. In the Prologue and Epilogue the horn is directed to play on the natural harmonics of the instrument; this causes the apparent ‘out-of-tuneness’ of which your reviewer complains, and which is, in fact, exactly the effect I intend.1In the many brilliant performances of his part that Dennis Brain has given he has always I am sure, played it as I have marked it in the score.2 Anyone, therefore, who plays it ‘in tune’ is going directly against my wishes! If the critics do not like this effect they should blame me and not Mr. Brain. Yours etc.,
The Physician Folly (1955)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

I SHOULD like to welcome most warmly into the exciting world of opera my young colleagues, Blythe and Collison. I have been working in that world myself for some ten years, and I know quite a bit about the excitements-and the difficulties too. First, the planning of the work (that is all excitement), then the writing of the libretto and the music (some difficulties here). Then, when all that is satisfactorily accomplished, comes the production, and the excitements and difficulties there can hardly be exaggerated! It is a triumph to achieve the production of a new opera, and I offer my young friends my sincere congratulations. And to you, the audience, I wish a happy and stimulating evening.
Britten’s Method of Composing (1956)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

BRITTEN: My method is quite simple. I plan my work away from the piano and away, moreover, from paper. I do 99 per cent of my work thinking about it-walking, or in trains, aeroplanes, if it’s not too bumpy, and in buses and cars and so forth. Then when the music is fixed in my head I go to the paper and work out more precisely the details. I don’t use the piano except at the very end when the work is more or less complete-more for confirming my ideas-if there’s been a harmonic progression which was new for me just to make sure it sounds, in sound, as it did in my head.BIRCH: And do you usually write out all the parts-or part of the parts yourself, or do you usually get someone to do that in detail?BRITTEN: Oh no, one does everything oneself. Usually in orchestral work or a work for chorus or an opera which is an elaborate one, the first draft which is in itself complete-it isn’t a sketch in any way, but it is a simple way of writing it down in what one calls short score. In other words, instead of writing the thirty odd lines which one needs for a full score, I write it in two or three or four staves.
Dennis Brain 1921-1957 (1958)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

Since the war, the horn playing of Dennis Brain has been one of the most familiar, certainly one of the happiest, features of British musical life. No season went by without his superlative performances as soloist in horn concertos. He was frequently to be seen at the first desk of one or other of the London orchestras, and no one will ever forget his inimitable tone and phrasing in the solo passages, from the small fragments in the works of the earlier masters (often devastatingly high-but so securely played), to the full dress melodies of more recent times (including Siegfried’s horn call). Then there were his many appearances in chamber music either with a piano (Schumann’s Adagio and Allegro, op. 70) or a string group (Mozart’s Quintet, K. 407). His own excellent ensemble,1 too, has delighted us with musician and beautifully rehearsed performances of music from Mozart to the present day, some of which was inspired by and written for Dennis. The tragic car accident of 1st September leaves a musical gap which can never be filled.2 It has robbed us of an artist with the unique combination of a superb technical command of his instrument, great musicianship, a lively and intelligent interest in music of all sorts, and a fine performing temperament, coupled with a charming personality. It has also robbed us of a man of rare generosity, simplicity and charm.
Television and The Turn of the Screw (1959)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

This is the first time in this country that an opera of mine has been specially produced on television, and I am extremely grateful to Associated-Rediffusion for its enterprise and courage in mounting THE TURN OF THE SCREW1 I am particularly happy that it should have been this opera that was chosen because it is one of my works most close to me, and also the one I feel most suitable for television. Television can do an enormous amount to popularise opera in this country, especially if it avoids the spectacular Grand Opera so beloved by the eighteenth & nineteenth centuries and concentrates on the intimate and concise, which seems to me to belong particularly to the present day. I cannot praise too highly the skill, taste and knowledge shown in adapting this difficult opera for television, especially when coupled with a respect for the score which did not allow one note to be cut.
Back to Britain with Britten (1959)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

REID: Please throw your mind back to 1930. You settled in London as a raw sixteen-year-old. Just where? BRITTEN: I took a bed-sitter up under the roof in a boarding house at Prince’s Square, Bayswater. I hired a small upright piano and took care not to play it after ten at night. I hadn’t much money. As the youngest of four children I lived on a smallish allowance from my father. I was a ‘scholar,’ of course, but that didn’t amount to much; it merely meant that my tuition fees were paid. REID: I understand you weren’t happy at the Royal College of Music. That true? BRITTEN: Let’s put it this way: I was rather a failure as a student. The trouble was, I had been studying with Bridge since I was a young boy. Bridge’s approach was that of the highly professional international musician. The attitude of most of the R.C.M. students was amateurish and folksy. That made me feel highly intolerant. REID: How did you get on with your two teachers-John Ireland and Arthur Benjamin? BRITTEN: Well enough. But they didn’t wield anything like as much influence on their students as the great Vaughan Williams. For my own part I was frankly suspicious of V.W My struggle all the time was to develop a consciously controlled professional technique. It was a struggle away from everything Vaughan Williams seemed to stand for. REID: But, like everybody else I suppose, you were swept off your feet by his Symphony No. 4?BRITTEN: The Fourth Symphony impressed me greatly. But an odd story went round the College after a rehearsal of it. Vaughan Williams was reported to have said of his own work, ‘If that’s modern music, all I can say is I don’t like it.’ This story, I must say, shocked me profoundly. In those days I was very violent in my opinions, very ready to have grievances.
People Today: Benjamin Britten (1960)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

HAREWOOD: I think I’ve probably caught you at about as busy a time of year as you can get, haven’t I?BRITTEN: Well, it certainly is with the preparation of the Festival and with the opera rehearsals in full swing and of course many other things to cope with as well, but it’s a time of year one-let’s face it-enjoys very much indeed.1HAREWOOD: And you’ve been preparing for it, what-for really most of the year, one way and another, thinking about it and then gradually working out-?BRITTEN: One really prepares each Festival almost before the previous one is finished, I find. In fact one of the most pleasant things to do, I think, while you’re preparing one Festival, is to think what you’d like to do for the next year. HAREWOOD: It’s really one of the marks of Aldeburgh, in fact, this feeling that it’s been prepared a long time in advance, that the whole programme’s been worked out, things that you’ve been wanting to do, pining to do for a number of months and then working at finding the performers ...BRITTEN: Yes, it is-it’s a very pleasant way of making music, especially as we have found that there are enough people who like the kind of things that we like to come and make the Festival worthwhile without a great deal of advertising and of trying to make the Festival known.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

BBC: Mr Britten, this work is called an opera based on the work of Shakespeare. Have you in fact set Shakespeare’s lines to music?BRITTEN: Yes, Shakespeare’s text is the basis of the whole work. I think we’ve included half a line which is not written by Shakespeare, but otherwise it is only his words which we’ve used.1BBC: What were your feelings about the shaping of Shakespeare’s thoughts to a medium he didn’t intend them for? BRITTEN: Well, that does n’t worry me so much, because Shakespeare can look after himself and however well or badly or much I cut the work, the text thank goodness-remains. But my main feeling in setting this work was enormous love and reverence and respect for the text. I feel that everyone ought to set Shakespeare to music in order just to get to know the incredible beauty and intensity of these words. BBC: What made you want to write an opera, then, based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream particularly? BRITTEN: Well, I wanted to set a play of Shakespeare’s for several reasons. One was that it had to be done in rather a hurry, and there wasn’t time to get a libretto specially written, and so one had to take work-words which already existed. The Midsummer Night’s Dream-oh; for several reasons-seemed to be most suitable; partly because it has such amazingly beautiful poetry already intended for singing. A lot of the fairies’ words were intended to be songs. It is a very good operatic story-it has very clear situations and it has, what fascinated me particularly, these three different levels of creatures in it. It has the royal humans, Theseus, Hyppolyta, and the lovers; it has the rustics, these lovable peasants rustics-who behave so beautifully and charmingly throughout; and then of course these curious fairy creatures, Tytania and Oberon and the-Puck and the others.