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THE PRINCE OF THE PAGODAS, Britten's only ballet score (his only mature score originally composedfor the ballet, that is),' and that comparatively rare bird in the 20th century, a full-length ballet, was first performed at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in 1957, on the first day of the new year, with the composer conducting. The choreographer was John Cranko and the scenery was designed by John Piper. Pangs rather than pleasure had attended the birth of the work, for Britten had found the whole business of writing the ballet an exceptionally arduous task. It was not so much the quantity of music involved, though this was daunting enough, but his being confronted with the difficulties, intransigencies, and vivid temperaments (and tempers!) of the ballet world. The 'language' of ballet did not come easily to him: thus communication was a problem. It was an experience that left him feeling bruised and debilitated;2 and almost up to the time of his death he could rarely be persuaded to

I MUST APOLOGIZE first of all for having mis-described one of the principal sources of the gamelan music in The Prince of the Pagodas. In n.19 of my earlier contribution on this subject (TEMPO No.146, September, 1983, pp.13-24: 'Catching on to the technique in Pagodaland') I referred to the overture 'Kapi Radji': this should read 'Kapi Radja'. If this were all I had to report, I should not be troubling the readers of TEMPO with the news. But in fact, as I shall explain below, there is a whole history attached to 'Kapi Radja', which has a direct bearing on Britten's ballet and of which I was unaware when I wrote my original article.' The first new fact I turned up (and I was put on the track of this by Neil Sorrell, of York University, and one of his M.A. students, Somsak Ketukaenchan from Thailand)2 was how 'Kapi Radja', the overture, was brought into existence: a most curious story, and one that was generated in the first instance by one of Britten's most famous works, the Young Person 's Guide to the Orchestra, op. 34, composed in 1946. To locate the story, we have to turn to John Coast's Dancing out ofBali (London, 1954). It was Mr. Coast who brought a troupe of Balinese musicians and dancers to England (and then to America) in 1952-an historic cultural event, with many repercussions, and still vividly remembered today. On p. 158 of his book, he recounts how he devized a programme with the village gamelan ofPliatan that would make particular sense for Western audiences

Stravinsky himself has argued that neo-classicism embraced not only his own works but those of his great contemporaries: “Every age,” he observes, “is a historical unity. It may never appear as anything but either/or to its partisan contemporaries, of course, but semblance is gradual, and in time either and or come to be components of the same thing. For instance, ‘neo-classic’ now begins to apply to all of the between-the-war composers (not that notion of the neo-classic composer as someone who rifles his predecessors and each other and then arranges the theft in a new ‘style’). The music of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern in the twenties was considered extremely iconoclastic at that time but these composers now appear to have used musical form as I did, ‘historically’. My use of it was overt, however, and theirs elaborately disguised. (Take, for example, the Rondo of Webern's Trio; the music is wonderfully interesting but no one hears it as a Rondo.) We all explored and discovered new music in the twenties, of course, but we attached it to the very tradition we were so busily outgrowing a decade before.”

clusion of tuba and double bassoon makes possible, together with the string basses, some range of positive colours at a very low pitch, so that the cello can be accommodated in its lowest register without having of necessity to be the functional bass too. The upper woodwind tend to be used as a composite group in a fairly high register, so that their tubby middle harmony shall not blanket the soloist. To point to all the felicities of orchestral lay-out in this score would require another article. Some of these can be glimpsed from the examples quoted, and I must restrict myself to a few of those which, in this as yet unheard work, most keenly stimulate the aural imagination. The development of the first movement includes a dialogue between double bassoon and high clarinet (later oboe) supported only by the soloist's oscillating thirds. At one point the scherzo surrounds a loud, nagging cello figuration with a high oboe octave pp and a Stygian chord (modelled on Ex.5, bar3) on horn pedal, tuba and double bassoon ppp; and the tenuity of texture that typifies this movement is often produced by no more than two widely separated instruments. The finale's rhapsodic fifth variation has a background shimmer of empty fourths on vibraphone and flutes, later translated to much lower register by horns and tam-tam. But aural titillation, if less surely calculated than this, is not the least common attraction of much of the music written today. I do not doubt that, when this symphony reaches performance, we shall recognize in the nobility and economy of its ideas, and in the masterly structures in which their potentialities are realized, Britten's most considerable achievement in the field of purely instrumental music. Once again, Rostropovich may take pride in a tribute that far surpasses a mere salutation of virtuosity.

One of the most interesting of the events of this year's Holland Festival was a performance, by the Slovenian National Opera (Ljubljana), of Prokofieff's The Love of the Three Oranges, whose première took place at the Chicago Auditorium on 30th December, 1921. The opera was then sung in French, though the original text—Prokofieff's own adaptation of a comedy by Carlo Gozzi—was in Russian. This festival production, one of exceptional colour and vigour from both the dramatic and musical points of view, was done in the original language.

In many ways Edinburgh is the most substantial, the most luxurious, the most opulent of British Festivals, yet not necessarily the most interesting or even the most significant. It is as well to remind ourselves that British Festivals did not begin with, and certainly do not end at Edinburgh. They have been characters on our musical stage for many years, although all too often they have disguised themselves with distressing reticence in the drabbest robes and made use of a property-box that has not caught up with the times. The Messiah might give way to a younger work now and again, if the suggestion were not considered revolutionary. A change round of the cast, a draft of new blood, is always refreshing, and indeed essential, if a festival is not to become a funeral. Charles Stuart, writing in TEMPO in the autumn of 1947, bemoaned the complacency of the Leeds Festival of that year and gave a list of the “Festival battle-horses”—Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Berlioz' Te Deum, Verdi's Requiem—which drew the cortège to its final resting place. The Leeds authorities seem to have realized the importance of a blood transfusion, and Mr. Stuart could not complain of the 1950 programme, which shows this Victorian infant (born in 1858) to be still of lusty and adventurous age and embarking on the second public performance in England of Britten's Spring Symphony, besides Honegger's rarely-heard King David, Rubbra's Morning Watch Motet, Strauss's Oboe Concerto and Vaughan Williams' Sixth Symphony.

Appalachia, Delius's first choral work—for orchestra and chorus rather than chorus and orchestra—began life (in 1896) as a set of orchestral variations on an old slave song. In 1902, however, Delius had vocal after-thoughts; he added choral parts to some of the variations and concluded the whole with a rousing choral finale. Excluding the finale, the vocal contributions take the following shape: (a) a choral (a cappella) variation—a heavily chromaticized harmonization of the slave song (“After night has gone comes the day”); (b) choral punctuations of certain variations, codas by distant la-la-ing, chordal sighs on ‘Ah!’, or wordless presentation of the ascending first phrase of the slave song. Appalachia, despite the vocal contributions, remains largely instrumental, and need not long detain us as an example of Delius's choral music. The finale, for all its ingenious manipulation of thematic material previously heard in instrumental guise, amounts to little more than a picturesque summing-up of Delius's evocation of the sights and sounds of the Mississippi. Of more significance for the future are the always very brief but deeply poetical vocal interventions in the orchestral texture. In Appalachia these disembodied voices have only a small rôle—tail-pieces within codas, so to speak—but Delius thereby disclosed his instrumental conception of voices which was fully to materialize itself in the subsequent Song of the High Hills, the two a cappella and wordless choruses To be sung of a summer night on the water, and the dance sections of A Mass of Life.

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.

To make the point that Britten throughout his vocal works shows an astonishing mastery of words, and an extraordinary capacity for putting them to musical use, would be to labour the obvious and accepted. No one doubts his capabilities in this direction, and his operas and song-cycles are full of examples the apt beauty of which defy analysis; unless they are first felt by the listener they might as well go verbally unremarked and unrecognised. Nevertheless the Wedding Anthem, Op. 45, happens to provide a remarkable instance of Britten's understanding of the musical possibilities offered by the poetic image, an example the significance of which can be made clear by brief analysis and which may prove to be a useful guide when considering like aspects of Britten's style.