One's memories of so large an international festival are bound to be mixed; while there were few classical performances of festival perfection to be heard, and little superior contemporary music to alleviate otherwise routine orchestral programmes, an occasional guest artist gave exceptional pleasure (Fischer-Dieskau, Schwarzkopf, Martinon), and one left Holland with renewed admiration for the Concertgebouw orchestra and with a somewhat broader knowledge of the work of contemporary Dutch composers. It was in the operatic field that the festival proved to be most enterprising and enlightened. The schedule included Falla's rarely performed La Vida Breve and El Retablo de Maese Pedro, Otello (under Krips), Der Freischütz (Elmendorff), Figaro (Krips), and the Essen production of Alban Berg's second, last and incomplete opera, Lulu. The performances of Freischütz and Figaro gave one an opportunity to assess the achievements of Holland's very youthful national opera, “De Nederlandsche Opera,” a company more recently founded than our own Covent Garden. While neither production was up to true festival standards (though Figaro was a considerable improvement on Freischütz), one was left with an impression of substantial promise for the future.

The performance of a contemporary work at the Salzburg Festival has become usual and this year the work chosen was Gottfried von Einem's latest opera, The Trial. Franz Kafka's novel of the same name (which, in his will, he directed should be destroyed unpublished) had already been dramatised by Gide and Barrault, and this opera libretto was prepared by the composer's teacher, Boris Blacher, and Heinz Cramer. The authors count it an especial virtue to have used only Kafka's own words, and at the most to have substituted direct for indirect speech. The individual scenes of the opera, furthermore, bear the same titles as the chapters of the novel. The single figure created by the librettists, who appears in both parts of the opera, is the “passer by,” but he, too, accords fully with the spirit of Kafka.

An interesting new aspect in French musical activity has been the success of the two small Italian ensembles specializing in Italian music of the eighteenth century, I Musici and Arcangelo Corelli, who appeared respectively at the Aix and Menton music festivals. The two concerts given by the former at Aix were a sensation of the festival and they apparently created an even bigger furore in Paris; whilst the latter, the mainstay of the Menton festival, distinguished themselves less sensationally but with equal justification.

The Zürich Stadttheater is probably the only one among the medium-sized German speaking theatres that can boast of having produced the whole Strauss repertoire, with the exception of Guntram, an early work, written very much under Wagnerian influence. In the main, even operas which make as great demands as Die Frau ohne Schatten were successfully presented by the resident company with only occasional guest artists. Capriccio and Die Liebe der Danae are the only ones which so far have only been given by the visiting Vienna and Munich Staatsoper.

Occasionally, in the history of operatic art, great works, with no pronounced revolutionary tendencies, yet models of simplicity, of sincerity, of artistic integrity, have been subjected to the most savage criticism, as unintelligent as it was undiscerning. We remain astounded at the lack of insight, of common-sense on the part of cultured critics. Even la Traviata was held up for censure as “prurient, foul and hideous”; whereas, in the whole of Verdi's work, there is nothing more poignant and sublime than Violetta's appeal: “Dite alia giovane.” Carmen was stigmatized as “grossly vulgar and vile,” whilst Vincent d'Indy—amazed at the aberrations of men—sadly remarked that the “music seemed crazy to nearly everybody.”

Ballet-premièeres of to-day have often all the glamour which was formerly a prerogative of opera. One has only to see the meteor-like career of the Diaghilev Ballet, the steady evolution of the Sadler's Wells Ballet, or even more recent the splendid progress of Balanchine's New York City Ballet, not to mention Paris, where opera always took second place, to be aware of this vital new development.

Even in Germany, which has little ballet-tradition, these signs are no longer to be neglected. The chief example is the Faust-ballet Abraxas by Werner Egk, which had a record number of sold-out performances at the Berlin Städtische Oper. No wonder that composers especially interested in the progress of the musical theatre, seek to exploit the latest trends for a synthesis of ballet-opera. Opera and ballet completely integrated! Opera itself has always tried to employ ballet for its own purposes. London knows of the Sadler's Wells Dido and the more recent Ashton-production of Gluck's Orpheus at the Garden, Paris had its greatest success of the last seasons when it revived Rameau's ballet-opera Les Indes Galantes and New York remembers the choreographic production of Bartóok's Bluebeard's Castle at the City Center. German directors often cast the three boys and three ladies in Die Zauberflöte with dancers and Tietjen, in his Berlin production of Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos banished the singing entourage of Zerbinetta and the three nymphs to the orchestra-pit, while their roles were executed by dancers, too.