This year's I.S.C.M. Festival was held in June in Baden-Baden at the music studio of the Südwestfunk, an ultra-modern concert hall situated a little outside the town, surrounded by majestic woods and with a lovely view of soft hills. In such surroundings one's aesthetic sense tends to expect a fair measure of beauty from the music one has come to hear. There was, however, more beauty for the eye than for the ear, and with a few notable exceptions, the standard of works presented was of a deplorably low level.

While Glyndebourne pursues its summer festival, Carl Ebert, its Artistic Director, looks back on the first nine months of his activities as Intendant of the West-Berlin Städtische Oper—a post he held already once before 1933. Ebert's come-back last September was an occasion of unusual promise. Berliners were expecting nothing less than a marvel from him. But while they gave him unlimited spiritual credit they were much more cautious about any more substantial help. The operatic warfare between the heavily state-fed East-Berlin Staatsoper and the definitely less municipally subsidised West-Berlin Städtische Oper has revealed to the greater public what an awkward position it must be to function as a West-Berlin Intendant who is easily outbought by the greater means of the people beyond the Brandenburger Tor. Nevertheless Ebert, through his rare talent for diplomacy, has emerged triumphantly from this fracas and his position is now stronger than any time before.

From his third visit to the United States Bartók never returned to Budapest. His remains, in a triple coffin, are buried in a cemetery on the outskirts of the City of New York. This New York represented much of what he sought to avoid all his life; noise, rush, many people and buildings, heavy traffic on the street with its accompanying gasoline, commerce and commercialism, tidal waves of opportunities for the practical-minded in any field, an Eldorado for the opportunist. He knew this New York, this America, from his earlier visits. The dictatorships which surrounded him in Europe, and which he hated—no matter from which side they blew their poisonous pollutions—compelled him to find refuge here.

September will mark the tenth anniversary of Bartók's death. The excitement provoked by the newness of his art has long since calmed down, and the time now seems convenient to attempt a sober and balanced evaluation of his creative work. It is to be free, of course, of uncritical and unsubstantiated enthusiasm, but equally free of that speculative and aphoristic conscience-searching based on dubious postulates which has recently become fashionable. What is wanted is not a definitive biography—the distance of ten years is too short for that—but a just assessment of the various facets of his music and his personality, and a well-grounded correlation of his art to his life. Though publication of his correspondence began some years ago, little systematic attention has been paid to other documentary evidence of his life and activities.

The Carl Rosa Opera, the only all-touring opera company left in the world in this age of high travelling costs, has fallen on difficult days. No doubt the provincial British cities should count themselves lucky that any opera company visits them at all. In the United States, Fortune Gallo's San Carlo Opera Company, which used to cross the continent with productions as good as the Carl Rosa's pre-war best, has not been on the move for more than a decade, and the only itinerant spectacles of the kind are packaged single operas sent out from time to time by various New York concert managers.