In order to say anything new about Puccini's orchestration, it is necessary to subject his manuscripts to a detailed scrutiny and it soon becomes apparent that many pages of his writing have not yet been microscopically examined. In fact the early copyists, probably working under the difficult pressure of a late arrival of the manuscript from the composer and an imminent theatrical rehearsal, appear to have approached his compositions with a certain creative flair of their own. Of the two operas which I have been able to copy out almost completely from the manuscripts, La Bohème and Tosca, only three or four pages towards the end of Act I of Tosca could be said to have been accurately copied, as though the work of copying might have fallen into different hands for those pages. Elsewhere throughout both scores, apart from the obvious changes which Puccini brought to his composition subsequently, there is a general wash of ‘editing’ which has introduced an average of from 40 to 50 small changes on each and every page of the score.

When William Hayman Cummings Wrote his biography of Arne in the early years of this century, he began the work with a brief preface in order (it would appear) to point the moral of the composer's life.

I am grateful to the Royal Musical Association for giving me the chance to talk on a subject on which I have been working for over thirty years, and to talk to an audience who know enough about it so that I can go straight in medias res. I am concerned with applying our knowledge of how the basso continuo was played in its own period (from about 1600 to about 1750) to present day conditions. The use of the basso continuo has never quite died out; it has survived until today in some organ lofts, and also as unequalled teaching material for the study of harmonies, not forgetting the odd recitative in some operas. But here I am only concerned with the handling of the form in present-day performances of works of the basso continuo period, which includes all composers from Monteverdi, Purcell, Bach and Handel to C. P. E. Bach, to mention only a few. The great interest in these works demands a revival of the old art of playing the basso continuo. Old and new books on the subject are being studied by conductors, players, editors and instrument makers; some excellent continuo players have appeared; and almost daily new publications with realizations of bassi continui are thrown on the market.

The subject of the present paper suggested itself to me while I was working on two very different subjects: Czech and Polish church-music in the sixteenth century, and the solo art-song in the Slavonic countries generally. It has nothing to do with the Iron Curtain and its effect on the world of music today. There is a much older curtain between Slavonic music and the Western world, which I should like to pull aside a little: a curtain woven by the group of languages spoken and written by the Slav peoples. It is true that a certain number of vocal works—mostly Russian operas of the period 1870–1910—have thrust their way through by sheer force of genius and we have learned to enjoy Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin and Tchaikovsky, in more or less unsatisfactory English or French translations, or even in Russian. (Sometimes, at Covent Garden, in three languages simultaneously. But operatic audiences are accustomed to enjoying opera in languages they don't really understand.) But not more than three Czech operas have made any real impact on Western Europe and not a single Polish one; even Russian opera is known only by a handful of works. In the field of solo song the position is much worse. We know Mussorgsky was a great song-composer but we know that mainly because of intensive propaganda rather than from direct experience; it can hardly be otherwise so long as Western singers fight shy of Russian; we should still know Hugo Wolf by hearsay rather than by hearing if we had to rely on translations. Russian is at least as musical a language as German, and as subtle, and the best Russian song-composers—not only Mussorgsky—write vocal lines that reflect and intensify the sense of the words, that are moulded to a certain arrangement of vowels and consonants, like good song-composers in any other language. All this, the great corpus of Russian song, remains almost unknown—or known by its least fine and subtle examples. And not only Russian song; Poland has produced at least two remarkable song-writers, Moniuszko in the last century and Szymanowski in the present one, of whom Szymanowski is known only in German translations and Moniuszko not at all, for his songs have never been translated into English and the wretched French selection is a hundred years old.

The ‘Blackfriars’ of which I wish to talk today is a mystery; and the Notes which I offer have to be to some extent speculative; but perhaps you will concede that speculation is the spice of research, and that deduction and intuition are both valid guides in probing into the past.

I Ought to say, by way of introduction, that my interest in the English Court ode owes its inspiration to a paper ‘The Secular Music of John Blow’, read to this Society on 10 November 1936, by Mr. Harold Watkins Shaw, and to the questions raised by Professor Westrup in the discussion which followed.

On 18 May, Mahler will have been dead for exactly 50 years. It is a convenient moment, perhaps, to survey, very briefly, the present state of Mahler studies and research.