During the three months, September ist to December ist, London has had the opportunity of seeing twenty-three different operas, given by five organisations—Sadlers Wells, the resident Co vent Garden Company, the New London Opera Company, the Vienna State Opera, and the English Opera Group. These twenty-three works have been made up as follows; four by Puccini: three each by Mozart and Britten: two by Verdi and Richard Strauss: and one each by Beethoven, Rossini, Donizetti, Smetana, Gounod, Bizet, Rimsky-Korsakov, Leoncavallo and Mascagni; that is to say, three written in the eighteenth century, twelve in the nineteenth, and eight in the twentieth. There is a certain amount of inevitable duplication amongst the five organisations concerned, and the considerable variation in production and performance is probably best seen by looking at the repertory of each company separately.

The late Professor Collingwood claimed that the dance is the mother of all languages in the sense that every kind or order of language (speech, gesture, and so forth) is an offshoot from an original language of total bodily gesture; a language which we all use, whether aware of it or not—even to stand perfectly still, no less than making a movement, is in the strict sense a gesture. He also relates the dance to the artist's language of form and shape. He asks us to imagine an artist who wants to reproduce the emotional effect of a ritual dance in which the dancers trace a pattern on the ground. The emotional effect of the dance depends not on any instantaneous posture, but on the traced pattern. Obviously, he concludes, the sensible thing would be to leave out the dancers altogether, and draw the pattern by itself.

The profound spirituality, the serenity, the noble maturity, and the wonderful freshness of Bruno Walter at the age of seventy-one, and of his art, have greatly impressed his innumerable admirers who had recently the privilege and happiness of seeing and hearing him conduct after an interval of many years. What is the source from which this magic power springs?

Arnold van Wyk's Five Elegies for String Quartet, of which miniature score and parts have recently been published, were written during 1940–41 and were first performed in 1942 at the National Gallery Concerts in London.

The title alone might suggest a set of five separate pieces cast in a uniformly grey mood. Such an impression would be false, however, for the work is essentially a single whole, and it covers an unexpectedly wide emotional range. This is perhaps less surprising when one considers how different are one's reactions at different times to the thought of impermanence and decay. (It may be worth remembering, in this connection, that the work was written in wartime London, at the height of the Blitz.) Indeed, the Elegies contain all the variety, in themselves and between one another, that one would expect in a work lasting eighteen or nineteen minutes. But this diversity is always unified by an underlying elegiac mood.

After the Edinburgh Festival Jast summer someone remarked ‘Now it will be no longer possible to plan any musical event of importance in Britain without first asking, what is Bing doing?’ The Festival, which took two years to plan, was the largest event of its type to be staged in the world. Though Rudolf Bing, its organiser, modestly gives credit to Glyndebourne and to Edinburgh for making the Festival possible, the fantastic onus of conception, planning, and organisation fell initially to Bing. That the festival was an unqualified success and will be repeated in 1948, is a tribute to Bing's unrivalled experience as a liaison agent between art and the people.

It is ten years since KAROL SZYMANOWSKI died at fifty-four. He was the most prominent representative of the “radical progressive” group of early twentieth century composers, which we call “Young Poland.” In their manysided and pioneering efforts they prepared the fertile soil on which Poland's present day's music thrives.