Lytton Strachey's Elizabeth and Essex is not a book which has pleased everybody, but it was the starting-point of this opera. This is not the place to analyse the book's deficiencies, real or alleged, but to assert that it tells skilfully a tense and dramatic story based upon historical persons and happenings. The late Sir Desmond MacCarthy, in his recently published Memories, recalls an interesting opinion that Elizabeth and Essex is almost a sketch for a play and that Strachey's method was inspired by or borrowed from the Elizabethan stage. Both the composer and the librettist of Gloriana were able to see in the book a sketch for an opera, and both are ready to acknowledge their debt to Strachey's dramatic sense. This does not mean that Gloriana is wholly based upon Elizabeth and Essex, or that it has emerged merely as an operatic version of that book. In the first place the makers of an opera are not under the obligation of even a picturesque biographer like Strachey to stick closely to history or chronology. Secondly, the makers of this particular opera came to be less concerned than Strachey with the amatory motives of the two principal characters and more concerned with the Queen's pre-eminence as a Queen, a woman, and a personality.

An orchestral prelude anticipates the music of the ensuing scene. Essex, attended by Cuffe, is listening to the proceedings within. Cheers of the crowd offstage and reports of Cuffe who is standing at an opening, inform us of what is happening at the tournament. Lord Mountjoy accepts a challenge. Both champions salute the Queen preparatory to tilting. Mountjoy is acclaimed by the crowd, and Essex does not conceal his jealousy. His anger grows when Mountjoy unhorses his opponent and is given a golden favour by the Queen. The enthusiastic crowd turns to her, and we hear a hymn of devotion the melody of which is to become an important feature of the opera:

“Green leaves are we,

Red rose our golden Queen.

O crownèd rose

Among the leaves so green.”

Best plan would probably be for ramps from which chorus could stand as if watching tournament happening in arena off stage. Chorus movements and reactions very useful in this way—would carry the initial excitement.

Judge best alternative to suggest arena by circle of gaily coloured tents between which Cuffe can dodge as if following tournament. Also, use a series of graded rostrums and steps, curved to suggest that they surround the arena.

The reaction of an audience will somehow always be commensurate with the effect created, precisely because it is subconscious. Thus there are works that release noisy and vociferous, yet meaningless and empty, applause: it echoes their own emptiness. And there are others to which the audience reacts less spontaneously, yet whose worth is not only immeasurably greater but their effect immeasurably deeper. It is definitely wrong to draw conclusions from the effect made on an audience, i.e. from the volume of the applause, as to the real strength of the impression made by a work, let alone as to its quality. The audience itself—this curious something—does not know how and why it reacts; it reacts automatically and subconsciously, more or less like a barometer. What matters is that one should know how to read this barometer aright and how to interpret that reading.

In introducing the work of the unfortunate Russian composer Stanchinsky, knowledge of whom has hitherto been confined, in this country, to a brief mention of him in my Contemporary Russian Composers (1917), I am assuming that as he died close on forty years ago we who now examine his output for the first time may consider ourselves, in relation to the composer and his work, as posterity and as, during his brief period of creative activity, he was regarded by some distinguished contemporaries as undoubtedly deserving the description of genius it seems important that we should assume that particular function in the exercise of which posterity is reckoned to be more-or-less expert.

The Strauss-Hofmannstal Ariadne holds a special place in operatic history as well as in the world of art as such, and above all in the life and development of this singular partnership between poet and composer which was to last for over twenty years.

In the works of these two artists it is always of particular interest to follow the gradual act of creation—the constant development of “the first idea,” which like a plant is being carefully watched and cultivated until it finally reaches maturity.