bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Ernest Bloch’s Sacred Service
Authors: Schiller David M 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
This chapter begins with a scene in the drama of assimilation: a humorous and affectionate sketch of Ernest Bloch as a greenhorn immigrant, written for The New Yorker by Bloch’s friend, Waldo Frank.
It was winter. The first evening, he sat entranced in the hotel lobby-so entranced by this new wondrous world that a stranger walked off with his coat. This treatment by America inspired him He adored America: he took out first citizenship papers-and the result was music.
With the Broadway cars jangling outside his window and a vaudeville singer overhead modulating ‘The Rosary’ in sixteenth notes, Bloch finished a Quattuor [sic].
Introduction
Authors: Kildea Paul 
Published: November 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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