In the last days of January, 1945, the Russian troops cleared entirely the city of Pest from the Germans. The most bitter fighting, however, continued on the other side of the river, in Buda, until the middle of February. The surviving population of the city emerged from the cellars where they lived during the seven weeks of the most savage, 24-hours-a-day bombing and shelling, only to find their town half destroyed on the streets littered with corpses. Kodály lived through this hell in the cellar of the Opera house, after his flat has been partly destroyed by an aerial attack earlier in the war. It was against this background the Missa Brevis was completed early in 1942.

The sociologist's view of the American university consisted until recently of an institutionalized football team hampered by an environment of classrooms, libraries and bewhiskered and bespectacled professors attempting to pursue the life of scholarship. This notion has been going out of fashion for many years now—very slowly but very surely. The war reached its hand into our seats of sport and carried the young gladiators away to battlefields of greater length than 100 yards—and the young philosophers too. Now our college population consists in large part of young heads of families trying to live on a monthly income of about £22 10s. (with a purchasing power much reduced by wartime inflation) and to get through their studies and into the world as soon as possible. Nuclear physics has recently become a thickly populated field of study but it is not only in the laboratories that we are busy. There has been some extraordinary musical activity at one of our eastern seats of learning.

During the last three years I have spent much time with Benjamin Britten when he was planning and writing his operas Peter Grimes and The Rape of Lucretia. As producer for both works I shared in discussions between composer and poet, and could follow their progress from first ideas to final performance. Lately, I have tried to profit by this invaluable experience in writing the text for Albert Herring.

I know it is hard to believe but I am often asked whether it is necessary for a singer to know what happens in all the scenes of an opera in which one has a role. That one must know just what the opera is about…! Good Heavens ! ! ! When this strange question revealing such an abysmal lack of understanding was first put to me I really couldn't understand what was meant by it. How can one portray a role in an opera if one does not have a complete conception of the whole story with every detail which relates to the role and all the action which has preceded it? Otherwise it would be nothing but empty and incredibly stupid theatre. If one doesn't know the story from which the opera was created: the libretto itself, every gesture will be superficial and all the action lifeless and false.

During the first season of opera in English at Covent Garden since the war, six works have been produced. Opera has alternated with ballet in the repertory, and the theatre has been open for a longer consecutive period of time than ever before in its history. Thus the initial stage in the immensely ambitious plan with which the Covent Garden Opera Trust is charged, has been accomplished. Properly to evaluate the worth of what has been done so far, it is important to look at it in relation to what is ultimately intended. This, it will be remembered, is the establishment of opera in England on a secure and lasting basis; not as an exotic luxury, imported from time to time for the benefit of a fortunate minority; but as a normal amenity of civilized life, a school in which all who wish to do so may learn discrimination. To say that there was no tradition of opera in this country would be an exaggeration. But the tradition is a very weak one, and from this aspect the Trust had few initial assets other than a glorious opera house, the living recollection of some great performances, and the knowledge that people in England were hungry for music.

As far back as I am willing to admit that I remember, Leonide Massine, dancer, choreographer, innovator, has been the question-mark of the Ballet Russe. I find that already in 1936 I was writing in “Footnotes to the Ballet”:

“Massine is a stylist unrivalled by any dancer of his time…he has a faculty for getting the very best out of his partners, so that when he is dancing in a ballet the whole work becomes suddenly a live, important thing…something of the quality of the great stylist that is Massine the Dancer lies like a patina upon the surface of the roles he has created for himself, so that though other dancers inflect and modify them, the role remains the clue of the ballet.…If Massine had not been so fine a technician himself it is questionable whether his works would have borne so clearly the imprint of his personality. The present writer is of the opinion that as his powers as a dancer decline, the inventiveness of his choreography will decline also.”

Contemporary music is a complex structure. It reaches from the traditionalists of the right wing to the experimentalists of the left. In the centre are those composers who take a stand from which, without forcing their material, they can achieve a free, personally stamped, stable form of expression. While thus “contemporary” is a mere dating, indicating the period of composition, “modern” implies a valuation of the style of the work. It would be an advantage if the I.S.C.M. would stress the modern and exclude works by composers who are only interested in the continuation of nineteenth century traditions, however skilled as craftsmen they may be. Every country has its clever traditionalists, and they are all very much alike, so that the real purpose of the I.S.C.M. Festivals should be to gather together in one place those works which, in the opinion of each individual country, are the most complete expression of what is new in the musical life of that country. The Copenhagen Festival fell short in this respect, yet even so, of the thirty works from sixteen different countries which were performed, I, for my part, took pleasure in listening to about one third, which after all is a high percentage.

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.