IN this paper I am not, primarily, concerned with facts. Some facts I shall state, other possible facts I shall guess at. My principal object is that of raising, and of suggesting an answer to, the question whether what we may call certain psychological possibilities exist. For this purpose I have taken the three best-known of Mozart's major works and with some little analysis, some application of their history—and perhaps some degree of imagination or fancy—endeavoured to show that they prove my thesis that programme music need not arise from conscious application of certain methods of composition; and that, in the subtler sense of the term, it is not dependent for its proper interpretation on a knowledge of the composer's source of inspiration.

It is not generally realised how much Verdi suffered from atrocious productions of his early operas, how much he had this matter at heart in his middle years, nor what energetic measures he afterwards took to remedy things. At the beginning of his career scarcely any consideration was given in Italian theatres to dramatic effect. The opera existed for the singers; the singers themselves were convinced of this, and the public agreed with them. The composer had to adapt himself, and his work, to these conditions, and if he did not, then suitable adjustments were made by others for him.

It is now very close upon two hundred years since Indian culture as such first struck scholars from the West and the momentous discovery of the language of Sanskrit opened the way for a completely new branch of studies—that of comparative philology.

About four years ago I was honoured by an invitation from the Royal Musical Association to talk to them about music in films. At that time the music directors of the British film studios were engaged in a campaign to lift the standard of music employed in motion pictures, and to replace, where possible, the tricks employed at Hollywood with something more worthy the attention of serious musicians. I therefore considered the time not quite ripe for such a talk and chose instead a paper of Opinions and Prognostications based upon prophecies found in the Proceedings of this Association.

In the early part of the war I became interested in fragments of the works of Johann Sebastian Bach quoted in books on the theory or history of music, or in albums of pieces, printed during his lifetime or in the fifty years from his death to the appearance of the first collected editions. In Marpurg's Abhandlung von der Fuge (1753, 1754), I found unexpected treasure; not only were there many quotations from a wide range of Bach's compositions, showing clearly that Marpurg was acquainted with the whole of Bach's output, but I found the subject and answer of a tonal fugue unknown to the complete edition of the Bach-Gesellschaft.

In offering the subject of Musical Librarianship to you this afternoon I have had to decide which of its several aspects I should attempt to describe, for there are several kinds of music librarians, with somewhat differing functions. The librarian of the Music Room of a great national library, such as the British Museum or the Vienna Hofbibliothek, will manage his collections differently from the librarians of private collections or teaching institutions, whose jobs again will bear only passing likeness to the librarian of an established orchestra or light music unit, while an assistant running the music and gramophone sections of a municipal or county library may scarcely be on nodding terms with any of these. There is ample matter to fill my time in describing my own job of servicing the materials of music for radio, but I have no wish to exacerbate your nerves with an essay on “a day at the B.B.C.”