Sibelius’s only balletic pantomime, Scaramouche, composed in 1913, remains one of his least-known works, even though it is one of his longest dramatic scores and belongs to his period of compositional re-evaluation. This article explores the pantomime in the context of its first production, performed in 1922 in Denmark and 1924 in Sweden. It argues that the pantomime’s reception both illuminates the importance of dance as a formative ‘modern’ genre within the Nordic countries during this period, and demonstrates that the score is defined by stylistic plurality, which was key to its theatrical success. The article calls for increased musicological attention to Nordic theatrical music, a genre that was extremely popular among early twentieth-century Nordic composers. It provided musicians with musical spaces that were more liberating than the concert hall or the opera house for the purposes of cultivating their musical language.

‘Multivalence‘ and ‘ambiguity’: these are the words that serve as the rallying cry in a recent group of essays that, with their strident, polemical tone, seem intent on dictating what is and what is not proper and acceptable in present-day opera analysis, at least as it is practised on opera from about Mozart's time to that of Puccini.

“Criticism,” said a friend casually one day to me, “is the salt of life.” I think that is true: as long as man has experiences, he will persist in discussing them. Music is an experience, and about that I will put a preliminary question: — When was the criticism of music born ?—and will offer an answer for your possible acceptance. It was when the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said, “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God. shouted for joy?” The inscrutable wonder of creation was then in performance, it was sung to the tune of the music of the spheres, and a selection of mankind—those whose antecedents made it likely that they would have the requisite knowledge— were filled with the love that precedes understanding, and affirmed the glory of that wonder.

I feel that my presence here requires a double apology for I can claim to be neither an authority on eighteenth century music nor a pianist. My interest in eighteenth century music is mainly a practical one and my only claim to your attention is that I have in certain transcriptions and arrangements both for the concert hall and the theatre succeeded, I hope, in popularising certain old music which might otherwise have remained familiar only to the scholar. As a pianist my limitations are even more marked and I can hardly hope to demonstrate that, as a writer for the keyboard, Roseingrave was second only to Domenico Scarlatti. Roseingrave's most striking work, however, lies not so much in his brilliant toccata-like movements as in his more introspective and experimental voluntaries and I hope that later on I may be able to give at least some slight account of these fascinating and original works.

The Movable Do ! Words pregnant with meaning, instinct with reality to the musician ! The text of the sermons in sounds expounding the universal message which the world calls music.

My object in reading this paper before the British Musical Association is to describe certain observations I have made concerning the folk-lore and music of the south of Spain. I shall not attempt to deal with the great problem of Spanish musical history: that has been done by Professor Trend in his excellent books such as The Music of Spanish History and Manuel de Falla. My study of the music of the south of Spain is mainly based upon personal experience as a minstrel in the towns and villages of the country, where I had the opportunity of mixing with folk-singers, guitarists, gipsy minstrels and dancers. My main object in studying thus the music of the Andalusian folk was to enable me to arrive at a deeper understanding of that elusive Indian Romany race which has played such an important part in the history of European music. It will, therefore, not be amiss if to-day I consider briefly the history of the gipsies as minstrels.

On two previous occasions I have had the pleasure of addressing the Members of this Association on the subject of bells, and I have ventured to choose for consideration this evening another aspect of the same subject in which there is a great deal to be done by musicians, and which is of much interest to them.

Little enough has been written on the Venetian operas of the second half of the seventeenth century, and to all save a few, familiar perhaps with Hellmuth Christian Wolff's pioneering work on that subject, or with Simon Towneley Worsthorne's more recent study, Carlo Pallavicino can hardly be more than a name. Indeed, doubts have been raised about the name itself. The libretti to three of his operas name the composer as Pallavicini, and perhaps following these, or impressed by his prolific output, Burney and others since have also pluralised the composer. However, there is good authority for the spelling which I adopt for this paper, for two documents preserved in the Venetian archives bear the composer's signature, and without doubt he signs himself, in a neat and confident hand, Carlo Pallavicino.

Of all musicians, organists have always had the greatest difficulty in getting regular practice on their instruments. Electric organ blowers were first used about 1900 and up to this time big church organs were usually blown by human power. One, or more often several men, called the “calcantores” or “calcants,” had to do this hard work. A big organ built at Halberstadt in 1361 had twenty bellows and ten men were needed to tread them. The church engaged these calcants for the services on Sundays and festival days. Organists had not much opportunity to play the organ except during services; they were always badly paid, could not afford to hire calcants, and, moreover, the Church did not encourage practice on what was probably a costly instrument intended only for use in the worship of God. So organists had to practice at home. In the fourteenth century some of them possessed small organs called positives. Perhaps a kind wife or other member of the family did the blowing, but hardly to such an extent as to make regular practice possible. A still smaller organ was the portative. This could be carried about and was often blown by the organist himself. As one hand was used to work the bellows, playing with both hands was not possible.

In discussing Programme Music one may consider it in relation to those principles which apply to the conception and the expression of an art, whether that art be music or painting or sculpture. But as such a survey of æsthetical questions would demand for its consideration a space of time far exceeding that at our disposal at present, it seems more appropriate that we should limit ourselves to the purely musical aspects of the matter. I will content myself with saying in this connection, that while the most advanced school of music of to-day—that which begins where Wagner left off—insists on the paramount importance of a literary idea being the basis of the composition, the most advanced schools of sculpture and painting, those of Rodin and Whistler and Degas, assert that the literary idea is the least matter to be considered in plastic or pictorial art, and that the chief if not the only end is the display of technique. I may point out a very curious inconsistency in this connection—namely, that among musicians I constantly find men who, while proclaiming the supremacy of absolute music, see no beauty in absolute painting and sculpture, and admire the most flagrant instances of a programme in these arts.

The subject of this paper is, I am aware, a little outside of the usual programme of the Musical Association, as it deals partly with matters of building and architecture; but it is of some consequence that music should be heard under the most advantageous conditions, and some of those whom I am addressing may have to decide on some occasion on the choice of a plan for a concert hall, and I should be glad if I could think that any of the suggestions I have to make may be of use to them in the future. The construction of theatres for opera I am purposely leaving on one side; opera is a spectacular as well as a musical business, and the theatre is a special class of building, which would demand a paper to itself. We are here considering only the question of hearing music.

Charles Koechlin showed little interest in silent films, and saw the film industry both at the beginning and end of his musical career as the worst aspect of the debased world of commercial art he so detested. According to his diaries, Koechlin first visited the cinema on i December 1912, and between this and his important visit to see Marlene Dietrich and Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel on 29 June 1933 he apparently went only eighteen times. Charlie Chaplin was the only silent film star that Koechlin really respected, for he represented eternal hope in misfortune, an escape from everyday problems into a world of fantasy, the ‘chimérique’ as Koechlin called it; all of this was relevant to his own existence as a composer. From the series of essays entitled Stars which he wrote in 1934 as a commentary to his Seven Stars' Symphony it is evident that Koechlin found silent film subtitles pretentiously banal, their stories conventional and superficial, often mutilating his favourite authors such as Jules Verne and Hans Andersen. With the arrival of the first sound films in the early 1930s, however, Koechlin suddenly found himself drawn to the cinema, and a curious, fascinating period of his life began, which brought to a head his inner conflict between the necessity to exist as a composer in real life despite serious financial difficulties, and his desire to escape into a private fantasy world in which he could compose. A passage from Tristan Klingsor's Scheherazade poem Le Voyage, which Koechlin set in 1922–23 and to which he often referred, summarizes his philosophy. The first phrase is the crucial one.

Much of the early history of the musical oratorio is still unknown. It seems that by the 1620s it was customary for religious confraternities to have music at their services before and after the sermon. In Rome the Congregation of the Oratorio, Philipp Neri's group which eventually met at the Chiesa Nuova, preferred music with Italian texts, whereas the Arciconfraternitàdel Santissimo Crocifisso, named after a cruxifix unharmed in a terrible fire at S. Marcello, preferred Latin texts. Apparently it is these two organizations, with their great emphasis on music and their financial support of trained musicians, which provide the background for the creation of the new musical genre and the impetus for its spread to other centres.

Ladies and Gentlemen,—The emotional aspects and sympathetic effects of the sister arts is the title of the paper which I have the honour of reading to you, but it has especial reference to the relationship of the sister arts— poetry, painting, and music. I need not say that any one of these three subjects would require a volume for itself, instead of a paper combining the three. It is therefore necessary that I should state at once the object I have had in view, namely, the throwing together of a few ideas interspersed with anecdotes when appropriate. I assign to music the position of the younger sister which she indubitably holds at the present day, but, in point of fact, in one sense, she is the elder sister, and as such I shall introduce her. I must ask you to define to yourselves this simple question—What is music? The answer must not be a preconceived idea or predilection, without a reason for your belief. A mighty river can be traced to its source, which may be a dripping rivulet; in like manner we must go to the fountain head, and trace music back to its primitive origin. What is music? To my mind music is a deviation from monotonous sound in its strict sense. If I hear the wild sounds which the wind capriciously elicits from the Æolian harp, and which can produce according to its force the softness of a child's slumber or the boisterousness of rage—this I call music. When I hear the gentle murmuring of a purling stream, the breaking of a wave on the seashore, the chirping of birds, or the echoing of a bell borne o'er the plain from distant hills—this I call music. If such be the case, then, music is the elder of the three sisters. Professor Tyndall shows that music differs from noise in that the sound entitled to the definition of a musical note is produced by regular and perfectly periodic vibrations, whereas noise is caused by an irregular succession of shocks. The shaking of a tool-box with its various metal contents can only produce a noise, because the shaking makes an irregular succession of shocks; but the drawing of a violin bow across a string produces music.

The Committee of the Mendelssohn Scholarship Foundation possesses material indicating that Mendelssohn wrote passionate love letters to Jenny Lind entreating her to join him in an adulterous relationship and threatening suicide as a means of exerting pressure upon her, and that these letters were destroyed on being discovered after her death. The notion that Mendelssohn would have written such letters conflicts strikingly with the received view of his character. Nevertheless, the veracity of the material is beyond doubt, and, while it does not include specific evidence that Mendelssohn and Lind began an affair, it points more clearly than has hitherto been possible towards an answer to this question. Thus it necessitates a radical revision of perceptions of these two major musicians. For Otto Goldschmidt, Lind's husband, destroying the letters was crucial in protecting the reputations not only of his wife and Mendelssohn but also of himself and his family.

This article examines a range of writings on the status of musical interpretation in Austria and Germany during the early decades of the twentieth century, and argues their relevance to current debates. While the division outlined by recent research between popular-critical hermeneutics and analytical ‘energetics’ at this time remains important, hitherto neglected contemporary reflections by Paul Bekker and Kurt Westphal demonstrate that the success of energetics was not due to any straightforward intellectual victory. Rather, the images of force and motion promoted by 1920s analysis were carried by historical currents in the philosophy, educational theory and arts of the time, revealing a culturally situated source for twenty-first-century analysis's preoccupations with motion and embodiment. The cultural relativization of such images may serve as a retrospective counteraction to the analytical rationalizing processes that culminated specifically in Heinrich Schenker's later work, and more generally in the privileging of graphic and notational imagery over poetic paraphrase.