Now is a suitable time for considering in retrospect the summer visit—their first—of the New York City Ballet to Covent Garden. The company consists of some forty-four dancers, led by Maria Tallchief, with Jerome Robbins as guest artist. The soloists are Janet Reed, Tanaquil Le Clercq, Melissa Hayden, Patricia Wilde, Beatrice Tompkins, Nicholas Magallanes, Francisco Moncion, Herbert Bliss, Todd Bolender, Harold Lang, and Frank Hobi. The artistic director and principal choreographer is George Balanchine; the general director is Lincoln Kirstein. It is to these two men that the company owes its inception and its long gestation, for although the New York City Ballet has only been in existence since 1948, it has a genealogical tree which goes back some fifteen years, when George Balanchine, a graduate of the Russian State Academy of the Dance and choreographer to the Diaghilev Ballet from 1925 to 1929, met Lincoln Kirstein in London in 1933, who, desirous of founding an American Ballet, persuaded him to establish a School of American Ballet in New York, where Balanchine, with a teaching staff consisting of Pierre Vladimirov, Anatole Obukhov, Muriel Stuart—long a member of the Pavlova Company—and Kyra Blanc, began the work of training young American dance aspirants who would provide the human material for a permanent company, with which it was intended to present ballets resulting from the collaboration of the most distinguished American composers, designers, and writers—and, later, American choreographers.

It has often been said that the greatness of an artist depends on his relation to the legacy of previous epochs and on his attitude to the intellectual impulses of his time. His awareness of these factors, conditioned by his response towards the obligations of society, will determine the value of his own contribution.

In Kodály's case investigation was hitherto centred mainly on his choral music: it is now proposed to examine his two large-scale, purely orchestral works of comparatively recent date.

One is always hearing it stated as an argument against opera that for quite a considerable time, say the last twenty-five years, nothing has been composed which has achieved world fame or even maintained its place in the repertory for a single generation. Yet a really thorough and knowledgeable examination—that is to say, one not impaired by partisan, doctrinaire points of view—would show that in the period from 1900 to 1950 a whole row of significant creations in the realm of music drama have come into being, which were wrongly judged as decadent, old fashioned, repetitive, eccentric or over ambitious, and were therefore put on the shelf until they suddenly rose up again through a lively new production, like the Phoenix from its ashes. So it was with Richard Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten when, on 1st October 1949, it had its first performance on the American continent at the Colón Theatre in Buenos Aires.

In Israel, music is a vital, living, breathing, pulsating, throbbing, inspiring and devotional part of the lives of the people. In Israel, music seems to fulfil so much of the emotional and spiritual needs of the people, that to the outside observer, the avidity and passion with which it is absorbed, (almost visibly chewed and swallowed) makes it virtually akin to the primal hungers of man.