This quotation, taken from a newspaper report of a London Borough Council meeting, represents a significant part of the background against which our current musical renascence must be judged. Last year the Arts Enquiry produced a Report on Musical Life in England, and in recent months there has appeared another of the annual British Council Reports, The Year's Work in Music, as well as the Fourth Annual Report of the Arts Council of Great Britain. The first-named is notable for its facts and figures—the cost of orchestras, the size of audiences, etc.—and should prove a useful source of information, a serviceable corrective to loose thinking, for some time to come. The second is deliberately more selective, pinpointing in a series of essays various aspects of the current scene—“Musical Life outside London,” “Musical Research,” etc.—and concluding with a “Selected Bibliography of Published Music and Musical Literature” and a “Selected List of Recordings of British Music” for the year under review.

The strongest single cause of the present-day cleft between composer and listener has been the increasingly swift raising of the norm of dissonance: if indeed “norm” is still the word: from modern music as a whole it is quite impossible to extract anything like generally valid harmonic formulae. It is true that with the increased availability of art to the inartistic the problem of popularity would in any case have arisen; but the dynamic development and—in 12-tone technique—dethronement of harmony has left the majority of listeners so far behind that most talents trying to be popular fall between the proletarian and the musical stools. It is in fact the Marxist musicians' bad luck that they have to attempt their extreme solution of the question how to be popular at the very time when the history of harmony and tonality makes their task extremely unsolvable. Thus they have come to demand more than the maximal musical conservatism, and to consider the atonalists right-wing. Meanwhile the right wing, while condemning Moscow's artistic approach, regards the atonalists as left wing, and an unhappy time is had by all. The paradox is easily solved: a political revolution needs the mass; an artistic revolution revolts against it.

Ever since the seventeenth century composers of English operas have been handicapped by the snob-preference for foreign works irrespective of their merits. In Purcell's day a second-rate French composer, whose past is still shrouded in Continental mystery, was so boosted in London even by Dryden that it was only through an open-air performance by Mr. Priest's school-girls at Chelsea that Dido and Aeneas convinced both London theatre managers and eventually Dryden himself that Purcell was “equal with the best abroad.” In this century, when the usual opera favourites were established, it has been even more difficult for English opera-composers to get a showing (at one time it had not been unheard of for English operas to be translated into Italian or German for production in this country): but twenty-five years ago the Royal College of Music followed the example of Mr. Priest by producing for the first time Vaughan Williams' Hugh the Drover, which was afterwards given publicly by the British National Opera Company, and in 1931 under the auspices of the Ernest Palmer Opera Fund, introduced The Devil Take Her, the first opera by the Australian composer Arthur Benjamin. The enthusiasm of the singers, headed by Sarah Fischer and Trefor Jones, the cunning skill of the conductor, Sir Thomas Beecham and the practical knowledge of the producer, John B. Gordon, who had had so much experience at Cologne and who was at the time doing such good work for opera at the Old Vic, all combined to make the performance outstanding.

Spring Symphony—the accent is on the first word. Musical pictures of the Spring have been combined in a symphonic cycle. The form deviates from the usual schemes: there is no sonata form nor are there any other of the traditional symphonic movements. Therefore, if someone has too hard and fast a notion of what a symphony should be, let him accept the word here in the metaphorical sense. But if a symphony means integrating the manifold aspects of one idea, here is a true example of the type. We have a series of twelve contrasting vocal pieces, the unity of which is provided not only by the one subject, Spring, but by the way in which the pieces are co-ordinated. They are grouped into four parts, similar to the traditional scheme of Allegro, Adagio, Scherzo and Finale, but our Allegro consists of several movements: an extended Lento introduction and four lively pieces which follow each other without pause. No thematic connection between them is apparent, nor between the movements of the second or third parts, representing, as it were Adagio and Scherzo. The fourth part is composed in one, as a Finale of large ternary form.

The musical creation of Richard Strauss has been revealed over a space of about seventy years. His two periods of greatest activity, the first of which is dominated by the Symphonic Poems, the second by Opera, have as “Prologue” his youthful work (up to, say, op. 15) and as “Epilogue” everything which comes after the opera Capriccio (1940–41), to which he gave no opus numbers and which he designated as his “inheritance.” In each of the four periods one special type of work dominates, but through all of them runs the Song. Even in the boy's and young man's earliest essays in composition it plays its part, and then in the 'nineties and around the turn of the century—that is to say, during the first decade of Strauss's married life—it comes to full flower. Naturally it receded somewhat when Strauss was dedicating his creative powers to opera above all else, yet even in the years between Salome and Capriccio he published several collections of songs. From his final working years (that is, after 1941) there are only, apart from two as yet unpublished songs to words by the Austrian poet Josef Weinheber, these Four Last Songs for soprano and orchestra. Not merely do they represent Strauss's last contribution to the Song, but they are, above all, the last compositions that he—in the year before his death—completed.

A recent concert tour of Jugoslavia has enabled me to see for myself a very healthy musical state in that country. Jugoslavia possesses really excellent Symphony Orchestras at Belgrade, Zagreb, and Ljubljana (all of which I conducted); and others, notably at Skoplie, are steadily being built up. Music in Jugoslavia is under the control of the Ministry of Science and Culture, at whose invitation I went there under the auspices of the British Council. Musically, the country is divided into three main sections, Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia, and there is a healthy rivalry between them.