This work, of which the last page bears the date 15th March, 1948, has occupied Strawinsky for some considerable time and it is the only one, I think I am right in saying, of his recent compositions not to have been written in response to a commission.

It would seem upon reflection that the most important thing about Britten's version of The Beggar's Opera is Britten's version of The Beggar's Opera. We therefore propose to dispense with the by now customary Overture-Potpourri on Gray, Pepusch, Hammersmith, Brecht-Weill, Dent and the rest, and to plunge instead straight into the Overture of Britten's realization, after reminding ourselves that, like Lucretia and Herring, this work is scored for chamber orchestra, i.e., solo wind- and string-quintets plus harp and percussion.

Since Jeux de Cartes a large proportion of the public might have thought that Strawinsky had come to the end of his cycle of “experiments,” of his “trial balloons” in the language of music, and that he had now stabilized on certain formulæ calculated to achieve an easy popular success—clear simplicity of instrumentation, normality of rhythms, sweetness of harmony, condensation of form, a rounding-off of all the corners, greater accessibility of performance, feelings of serenity or gaiety. In sum, it might have been thought that Strawinsky had turned bourgeois, reactionary, with the hand extended to the worldly and complacent audiences of those theatres which are richest and most steeped in tradition. The technicians accused this new Strawinsky of treason in the sacred struggle for the renewal of the language of music; the cultured public accused him of having capitulated in the face of the difficulty of a more austere, hermetic and refined expression in order to abandon himself to expression within a range of feeling altogether easier, more apparent and more immediate. And finally there were those who accused Strawinsky of having quite plainly sold himself to the American taste—uncultured, gross, commercial—for what is striking but easy, preferring, in art as in other things, the standard product to the precious rarity.

When I was approached recently by a music-lover of Los Angeles, one of those typical “hommes de bonne volonté” full of utopian schemes, and when he expounded, to me his idea of an “International Musical Olympiad,” I declined to enter into discussion on the manifestly unrealizable project (or rather, dream). I pointed out to him the unpropitiousness of the year 1948 for such a vast undertaking, the shortness of time, the absence of “goodwill,” of harmony, of co-operativeness in the atmosphere, and so on and so forth.

At the festival of contemporary music one had a comprehensive vista of new music in Hungary. The performances were, on the whole, better than average, with a few outstanding productions. Among these I would include the Gala-performance of Bartók's three stage-works; The Wonderful Mandarin under László Somogyi was especially noteworthy. Of the other Bartók performances I mention particularly Doráti's reading of the Concerto for Orchestra, and István Antal and Paul Kadosa's interpretation of the Concerto for 2 Pianos and Orchestra.

Hearing Britten's Saint Nicolas sung by village choral societies in the overcrowded parish church at Aldeburgh last summer was an exhilarating experience. To begin with, there was the enormous satisfaction of being allowed to join in the singing of both the hymns in the cantata. Audiences are often given the courtesy-title of “congregation” when they turn up to listen to a concert in a church, but they are very seldom given the chance of justifying their existence. This was only one of the barriers that Saint Nicolas removed during the afternoon. There was also the appropriate absence of any rigid boundary between sacred and secular music. It would have been impossible for the listener to feel dismayed at the violent contrasts in the work: there seemed nothing in the least incongruous in the mixture of the gurgling of the bath-water and the contemplation of man's solitary wilderness of doubt and despair.

My visit to South America was occasioned by the fact that the Confédération Internationale des Sociétés des Auteurs et Compositeurs held Congress there during the second week of October. The gathering was one of considerable importance. There were some 120 delegates from 31 countries. Among the British delegates were Sir Alan Herbert, representing authors, and Dr. William Walton and Mr. Eric Coates representing composers. UNESCO, the Library of Congress at Washington and the International Literary and Artistic Association also sent observers.