The Golden Age of Opera

by SIR OSBERT SITWELL

1

WHILE I was still in training at Aldershot, I succeeded in reaching London one June evening, with a day or two to spare. I had beforehand booked a seat for Covent Garden, where there was a season of Russian Ballet, as it was termed. I went out of curiosity, for I possessed no acquaintance with ballet and little with opera. Indeed I had only been inside Covent Garden once, the summer before, when I had first dined with my cousin, Irene Denison, at her father’s London house, St. Dunstan’s, a Regency palace, set in a vast circle of baked and honey-colored lawns.

That occasion still remains with me, for it was a golden, hazy evening in late July, and the heat, I remember, had affected many of the animals in the Zoological Gardens near-by with a nostalgia for Africa, so that they were roaring and growling and braying their hearts out, and we seemed to be feasting among the swamps or deserts of the Equator. I recall that heat, too, because the only other person at dinner was the Kaiserin’s Mistress of the Robes, a large Junkeress, tightly buttoned into pale velvet, the color of German eyes, and all through the meal, with the persistence of her race and type, she slowly unfolded, beneath the tropical sounds of trumpeting and leonine bellows, in an unemphatic voice, but with a strong German accent, the plot of Madame Butterfly, the opera that was to be performed. Nothing could stem that relentless pressure. When we reached the Londesboroughs’ box, the Junkeress had only got so far in unrolling the story as the beginning of Act II. But now she stopped to examine the crowded house.

The audience at Covent Garden was in a state of genteel excitement, since two famous stars of the day were performing: Bassi as Pinkerton, Destinn in the title role of Madame Butterfly. The very absurdity of the performance, its stilted realism, its playful cries and tears caught in a note, had made it all the more memorable. Albeit we had entered King George V’s reign, this was the apogee of Edwardian opera, both in the music and in its rendering. In a sense, it was perhaps a pity that we did not hear Caruso and Melba singing that evening in La Bohème, instead — as I heard them subsequently, but neither was performing in London that year. Destinn was certainly a finer artist, but Caruso and Melba, when, fat as two elderly thrushes, they trilled at each other over the hedges of tiaras, summed up in themselves the age, no less than Sargent netted it for others.

Not only was Caruso as natural a singer as the thrush he resembled, the blackbird, or the conventional nightingale to which he was compared, but contradictorily, for all its lack of art, his voice, carrying in its strains, in the sound of those notes which he was able to attain and hold as could no other singer, of that or of a later day, the warm breath of southern evenings in an orange grove, and of roses, caught in the hush of dusk at the water’s edge, possessed, as well as a high degree of technique, a certain kind of art. Of Melba the same cannot be said. Her magnificent voice was not invariably true, having about it something of the disproportion of the Australian continent from which she had emerged. But at least it can be claimed for her that, with her ample form lying on a couch, she made a surprising and unforgettable type of romantic consumptive.

In Madame Butterfly, Destinn was no less unusual as a Japanese geisha. Yet it would be absurd to pretend she was not effective and, even, moving in the part. Madame Butterfly is an absurd opera, the music has its own faults, but was there ever a score more vocal, or more permeated with the contemporary feeling? . . . This was, as I have said, the first time I had heard an opera, and it was rendered even more interesting for me than it would otherwise have been, by my recollection of having seen the composer, Puccini, the previous year, walking on the ramparts, the top of the stout walls — so broad that they support an avenue of full-grown trees — which enclose the little city of Lucca, and separate it from its prosperous and verdant plain. This town had been his birthplace, and, as he strolled under the flowering chestnuts, with their pallid torches showing ivory white among the thick leaves, he was treated as if he were an emperor. People went bareheaded in his presence.

And so, on this occasion, too, when I booked a solitary seat for Covent Garden, I expected, I suppose, something of the same kind: for I was aware that, as a rule, ballet was interpolated in operas, and I knew nothing of the program. Detained at Aldershot, I did not reach the theater until the moment when the curtain was going up, for the first time in London, on L’Oiseau de Feu. I had been so tired by the day’s riding that I had nearly decided not to go — but directly the overture began to be played, I came to life. Never until that evening had I heard Stravinsky’s name; but as the ballet developed, it was impossible to mistake the genius of the composer, or of the artist who had designed the setting; a genius plainly shared, too, by the chief dancers and the choreographer. Genius ran through the whole of this ballet. Nevertheless Stravinsky towered above the others, a master.

As I heard L’Oiseau de Feu and watched the accompanying dances, I was aware that for the first time I had been given the opportunity of seeing presented upon the stage a work of art, imbued with originality and with the spirit of its own day; not a tawdry glut of color and rushing movement — like Reinhardt’s spectacles, that had somehow burst right out of the theater into enormous barns like Olympia; with them I was already acquainted — but a performance in which every gesture, every line, every tone, meant something; a work of art that, could not have existed before, and would cease to be given in its perfection, within the brief season of the dancers’ linest span.

Because, for the first, time, I was able to watch, in addition, the dancing of great artists, Karsavina, and Adolf Bolm, who was superb in his part. Karsavina, so beautiful today, was then at the height of beauty and of her career, the greatest female dancer that Europe had seen for a century. The very poise of her lilylike neck was unforgettable, and there was about her shape and movements a perfection of grace that for the first time made me realize how near arc the Russians, for all their hyperborean extravagances and childish glitter, to the ancient Greeks. Those working in the fields of art possess the same saturation with it that sets the Greeks apart as a race; and with Russians, as with Greeks, the theater is the real dynamic center of their arts.

The long, plangent ripple of the harp strings as the Firebird entered appeared to offer to one some hidden meaning, just as the gathering of ogres and sinister satellites round the crouching, wasplike figure of their baleful master, Koscheii (played that night by the great Cecchetti), seemed to bear some relation to life as I knew it. . . . The gates of life could be opened, if one possessed the key (what could I do?), and the powers of evil, chaotic and uncreated, ill-proportioned and anomalous, could be put to flight by one feather plucked from that rare bird. The raging of the old tyrant, and his sycophantic cronies and dependents, could be faced.

Now I knew where I stood. I would be, for so long as I lived, on the side of the arts. (They needed champions, as well as exponents; at least my life in Barracks had taught me that.) I would support the artist in every controversy, on every occasion. . . . And in my bones I felt that this opportunity would most frequently come my way: but, thinking it over coolly, how? . . . To what could I turn my hand or eye? I possessed no gifts, no capacities, little perseverance, few friends, I was ill-educated, and found myself tied hand and foot to a way of life I detested. Among my own generation, I knew no one of creative genius — except two most rare, but as yet unfledged artists, my own brother and sister. And their work still lay, like mine, embedded in the matrix of the future. . . . What could I do?

2

PERHAPS those who belonged to my generation never had the chance of seeing pure acting at its best — for Irving was dead, and Sarah Bernhardt was an old woman — nevertheless what a privilege we enjoyed in going to hear and see Chaliapin, that rarest of salamanders, a great artist with a great voice. How fortunate I have been in that I have seen him many times as Boris, have often watched him ride onto the stage alone, on his white horse, to stare down on Moscow burning, and, in a role of an altogether different character, have applauded his gigantic sense of comedy as Don Basilio, in the Barbiere. In the towering and magnificent frame that housed his voice, he seemed to embody the immense spaces of his native country, to be, almost, a god of Russian music. But though, like the majority of artists, he was without class, admitting the existence of no division but that of talent, it was easy, too, to picture him working with his friend Maxim Gorky, on a barge, as formerly he had done. This man, the most splendid interpreter of Russian music, with all its grandeur and lack of pettiness, had about him, it is true, no conceit, no self-consciousness: but he was supremely confident of his powers.

Thus, one evening, in after years, when I had grown to know Chaliapin fairly well, Lady Aberconway and I went to congratulate him, in his dressing room, after he had taken the part of Salieri in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Mozart and Salieri. Mozart had been played by a young Italian tenor, of whom Chaliapin was a warm supporter, having proposed him for the part, and to a certain degree coached him at the rehearsals. The Italian was small — or perhaps not, for one of Chaliapin’s attributes was that, though a giant, he never looked over life-size, but merely reduced the scale of others, even tall men. At any rate, on this the first night, this protégé had enraged Chaliapin by the lightness of his singing, and by the airy way he played the harpsichord on the stage, lifting his hand up and down in a fashion against which he had been warned by the great singer. When, therefore, we arrived, and opened the door, we found the enormous Russian shaking the young Italian, as a mastiff might shake a griffon. After we entered the room, he desisted, saying in explanation, “And the plot of this opera is that I have to be jealous of him!”

3

IN the same theater in which Chaliapin appeared, on other nights or at other hours, another art besides opera was to be seen in its perfection: the ballet that blooms for a year, it seems, every century, was enjoying one of its culminations. It becomes inevitable, when writing of it at this time, that the word genius should recur with frequency, almost with monotony, in these few pages, for no other word can describe the quality of the chief dancers or the influences at work: Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Karsavina, Fokine, and Nijinsky. . . .

Of all the productions of these years, Petrouchka must be mentioned at the head of the list; the music the first work of a composer of genius grown to his full stature. (L’Oiseau de Feu, wonderful though its music is, was the more derivative work of a very young man); as moving and symbolic a creation of its time as Mozart’s Don Giovanni. I have seen other great dancers, but never one inspired as was Nijinsky; I have seen other great dancers play Petrouchka, but never one who, with his rendering of a figure stuffed with straw, struggling from the thraldom of the puppet world towards human freedom, but always with the terrible leaden frustration of the dummy latent in his limbs, the movement of them containing the suggestion of the thawing of ice at winter’s edge, evoked a comparable feeling of pathos.

This ballet was, in its scope as a work of art, universal: it presented the European contemporary generation with a prophetic and dramatized version of the fate reserved for it, in the same way that the legend of the Minotaur had once summed up, though after the event and not before it, the fate of several generations of Greek youths and maidens. The music, traditional yet original, full of fire and genius, complication and essential simplicity, held up a mirror in which man could see, not only himself, but the angel and ape equally prisoned within his skin. The part of Petrouchka showed Nijinsky to be a master of mime, gesture, drama, just as, in pure dancing, his rendering of the Spirit of the Rose, in Le Spectre de la Rose, was the climax of romantic ballet. His profoundly original ballet, L’Aprés-midi d’un Faune, to the music of Debussy, produced at Covent Garden on February 17, 1913, and his amazing feat Le Sacre du Printemps, a ballet that will always stand alone, the most magnificent and living of dead ends, proved his genius as a choreographer, no less than as a dancer.

But let us turn for an instant to his less revolutionary creations; to, for example, Le Spectre de la Rose. His miraculous leap across the window into the room in the ballet I have named was something that no one who saw it will ever forget. This great dancer seemed to hold all physical laws in abeyance and for an instant of time to remain at the height of his leap, poised and stationary; when asked how he achieved this defiance of the laws of gravity, he replied, “It’s very simple: you jump and just stop in the air for a moment.”

Even as I followed Nijinsky’s movements on the stage, I realized that I was watching a legend in process of being born: for he was by nature fabulous, a prodigy. Now the legend is complete, even to the affliction that has fallen on him; reducing him to the status almost of the inanimate, of the puppet he so often portrayed, but with occasional chinks of light filtering through into his tragic mind. . . . No less true, though happier, is the legend of his partner in triumphs, his complement, the great Karsavina; in Le Spectre de la Rose, as graceful and romantic a spiritual realization of the flesh as Nijinsky, a being of a new creation born of the rose, was an epitome in flesh of the spirit.

On June 23, I was present at the initial appearance of a great new dancer, a man the coming decade was to reveal as no less individual and significant an interpreter of roles in satirical, grotesque, and baroque ballets, and no less remarkable a choreographer of them, than Nijinsky had shown himself to be in the range of classical, romantic, and revolutionary: Massine — or Miassine, as his name was then spelled — in after years a valued friend of my brother and myself. La Légende de Joseph, in which he first danced, had been designed as a spectacle, rather than a ballet, to the music of Richard Strauss. In it, figures costumed by Leon Bakst, and such as might have been portrayed by the brush of Paolo Veronese, feasted in an enormous scene, pitched, at a hazard, halfway between Babylon and Venice, and extravagantly furnished with huge twisted columns of bronze and gold, the creation of the fashionable Spanish decorative painter, J. M. Sert. This ballet, the last pre-1914-war production by Diaghilev, was typical of that phase of the Russian Ballet. Lavish, profuse, full of somber colors, blues and greens, and dripping with gold, it helped, like the music, to overwhelm the dancers, even Karsavina, with her great allurement and experience, who played Potiphar’s wife.

As for Massine, I think only the most expert could have foretold from the timid movements of the young man — timid, perhaps, because it was his first appearance, no less than because the sentiment he expressed fitted the role — how fiery and idiosyncratic a dancer, though ever in the great tradition, he was destined to be. The nervous youth I have described was borne onto the stage in a hammock: when he got out, he was seen to be dressed in a white goatskin, and to have the look of a typical Alexandrian portrait of the fourth century; his natural appearance, which he has always retained.

4

THROUGHOUT the three years of 1912, '13, '14, new operas and ballets were continually being produced, until it seemed as if almost every evening brought its own vision, its own experiments in dancing and music. And it would be profoundly ungrateful not to mention that the man responsible for these seasons, and for the enterprise they showed, was the then Mr., now Sir, Thomas Beecham, greatest of English conductors and wittiest of musicians. Not only did he make known to us countless foreign works, but at the same time he accomplished more than anyone else for English composers. While thus every week introducing new works at a great expenditure of money and energy, and receiving little in return except misunderstanding, coupled with a certain amount of that deliberate malice which the stupid always have in reserve for the creative, this most unusual man went on his way, undeterred by the lack of support he occasionally encountered, He started life the son of a very rich man, and has at times, through his work for the English musical world, been a poor one. Both conditions stood equally in his way: English people do not expect musical genius from the rich, nor expensive seasons from the poor.

Let us consider some of the works he brought to the attention of the audiences of 1914. I have already described La Légende de Joseph. A fortnight earlier, on June 9, Daphnis and Chloe had been mounted, to the exquisite music by Ravel, and a week before, on June 15, came the first night of Le Coq d’Or. Here was a production such as none had dreamed of in the world of opera, and such as had only been brought into the realms of possibility by the simultaneous presence in London of the two great Russian companies of opera and ballet, who were thus able, in a single effort, to combine. The stage was set between two choirs of singers, dressed in petunia color, and ranged, tier above tier, to the summit almost of the proscenium: and the action part of each dancer was accompanied by an appropriate solo voice. Besides giving us some of the most dramatic and haunting music of the past century, Le Coq d’Or constituted a great satire. In its stilted, dreamlike rhythms, displayed against a background of huge flowers and brightly hued buildings, was to be felt a mockery of the great, a kind of joy in the doom of lordship. Fortunately for its success, the fashionable audience could revel in the beauty and strangeness of it without concentrating too much on its meaning or implications. I mention it particularly and at length because it was so laden with omen and portent for those who watched it. King Dodon was a symbol to the youth of the world: and who can ever forget the Astrologer and his song?

Three nights after the introduction of Le Coq d’Or, we were given another combined opera and ballet, Stravinsky’s Le Rossignol: a work now rat her seldom mentioned, and perhaps in its first version not altogether successful. It did not manifest the miraculous sense of growth, of fullness of the earth, that Le Sacre du Printemps possessed, of the blocks of ice bumping and clanging together in the freed rivers, of the furry buds bursting from their boughs with the loud grunts and cacophonies of spring: it had not Petrouchka’s drama and pathos, nor the mellifluous enchantment of L’Oiseau de Feu, yet it had about it a kind of pure, flat, two-dimensional beauty, very rare and full of delicacy. . . . At the end of the performance I was excited to see the Russian composer, the master of the epoch, walk before the curtain. Slight of frame, pale, about thirty years of age, with an air both worldly and abstracted, and a little angry, he bowed back with solemnity to the clustered, nodding tiaras and the white kid gloves, that applauded him sufficiently to be polite: yet for all their genteel tepidity, how little did the audience comprehend the nature of the great musician to whom they were doing honor, or the often eschatological import of his work.

By one of the most singular paradoxes in the history of art, the tiaras and the gloves at least were there, doing him honor from the stalls and boxes; whereas the audience that should have been in their place, the advanced painters and musicians of England, convinced that nothing esthetically good could come from such a quarter, rigorously abstained from being present at any performance at Drury Lane and Covent Garden. Thus the enthusiasts for beauty missed, for some years, the most vital influence in the art world. Few of them saw Diaghilev’s ballet until 1918, and I myself in the autumn of that year introduced the great Russian impresario to Roger Fry. To him, and his followers, all sumptuousness was always suspect; haunted by the specter of L’Art Pompier. . . . And so it was that the fashionable and, for the most part, inappropriate audience had been the first to be aware of the revolutionary genius of these dancers, decorators, and composers. It is always a gamble: no one can be sure of the direction from which the next development of art, or the next artist, will arrive. Fortunately for myself, I came from the stalls, the wrong side of the house, and at Covent Garden and Drury Lane found the esthetic and musical education that had been denied me elsewhere.

5

AMONG the occupants of the stalls, there were, moreover, some genuine patrons and persons of discernment; chief of whom was Lady Ripon, a memorable personification of the old order. Alas, I never knew her well, but I met her sufficiently often to be able to admire her unusual beauty, personal dignity, and intelligence. She carried herself with the supreme grace of her generation, and with her gray hair, and distinguished features, of so pure a cut, she remained, though no longer a young woman, the most striking person to look at in any room she entered. A daughter of Lord Herbert of Lea, and sister of Lord Pembroke, as became a member of her family she was a patron of the arts, as well as a leader of the social world. Perhaps it was her Russian ancestry, so visible in her appearance — for she was a great-granddaughter of Prince Simon Woronzow, brother of the celebrated Princess Daschkaw — which may have been partly responsible for her great love of the Russian Ballet.

I first saw in her company Sergei Diaghilev; with his burly, tall, rather shapeless figure, he seemed formed like a bear, to wear a coat of fur, but his clothes were smart and well cut. His black hair carried a badger’s stripe of white in it, and he was of an impressive and alert appearance, with a robust elegance pertaining to him. Nevertheless, when he was preoccupied, his massive head, with a nose of the flat, not aquiline, Russian type, had something of a Velasquez dwarf’s air of solemn pathos and listless fatality: but this was quickly banished by the intense energy of his eyes, as they came to life again, and as he gave his very charming smile. The great impresario would never talk English — and, indeed, almost the only time I heard him speak it was at luncheon one day. He was intensely interested in food, and said suddenly and very distinctly, “More Chocolate Pudding!”: a dish for which he had a curious foreign mania. French he spoke with wit and ease.

At Co vent Garden, the house would contain many foreigners: music and dancing knew no barrier of race. Indeed t he whole world of amusement was international. Similarly, among the people I saw of my own choice, talk turned as much on doings in Paris, Berlin, Rome, Vienna, and St. Petersburg, as on events at home. There was none of the hatred and dissension that has devoured nations and classes ever since 1914. In June of that year Richard Strauss, for example, came over to London for the rehearsals of La Légende de Joseph, and was present at a reception at the French Embassy (that evening, the only hint of the approaching conflict was when a well-known American hostess went up to the German composer, and remarked to him in a confiding and congratulatory voice, “Monsieur Strauss: in England we think your music very vulgar”: a scene which must have ravaged the heart of that accomplished diplomat, Monsieur Cambon).

To show the high place that London held as a music center, the Morning Post was able to announce on June 12 that the Music Club would give a reception to Dr. Strauss on the twenty-first, in celebration of his fiftieth birthday, and that besides the guest of honor there would be present Monsieur Igor Stravinsky, Monsieur Chaliapin, Madame Karsavina, and Monsieur Claude Debussy; that Mr. Thomas Beecham would conduct Strauss’s early suite for thirteen wood-wind instruments, and that Madame Elena Gerhardt would sing a group of his songs, accompanied by Herr Nikisch. . . . This particular occasion, I believe, never saw the full realization of the program designed for it, but that it could come so near fruition shows how far, how deep, how bitterly, we have fallen from the standards of those days.

On the evening in question Strauss did, in fact, join in the performing of his Sonata in E Flat for pianoforte and violin, Lady Speyer playing the second instrument. And, as if to return these international compliments in the arts, a few evenings later Debussy went to Lady Speyer’s house in Grosvenor Street. Behind a frowning, rusticated Palazzo Strozzi front, it sheltered the sort of art collection that is seldom seen in England but is more common in America. Many of the items might have been chosen by a magpie who had found himself a millionaire: some were dark in tone, it is true — dark in the manner of oak, walnut, armor, red velvet — yet all glittered and were rich in luster. There was something in the atmosphere, too, that recalled the public rooms of an expensive liner. French staircases, German woodcarving, Augsburg plate, crystal vases from China, Persian tiles, and some of the furnishing of Marie Antoinette’s boudoir, all these were united by the taste of the owners for objects of luxury.

At the back of this mansion, on the ground floor, was a music room, built at the further side of a small garden court, in the middle of which stood a Renaissance fountain. And in the summer months, if there was to be an entertainment, there would appear on the water in this basin, as a sort of mute herald of a party, a large white water lily tied by a piece of string to a ring at the bottom.

My admiration for Debussy was so enormous that I remember nothing of his appearance. I shook hands with him: I recall my emotion, I remember clearly Madame Debussy’s face — but that is all! . . . By then the first impact of his music had already a little worn off, and he was recognized as the presiding genius of French music, though only u few years before, even to the most musically endowed of concertgoers, his work had seemed as difficult to understand as would be a picture viewed through spectacles that did not focus. His music sounded, it may be, a little incongruous, a little over-pure, between the rich walls of the Speyer mansion; even the water lily hardly enticed the breath of Nature into the garden: but it cannot be gainsaid that here it was possible to hear Debussy’s music played, and to meet the illustrious composer, and that everything modern and enlivening in music would before long find its way to these hospitable doors.

More in keeping with the surroundings, however, was the music of Richard Strauss, so essentially nouveau riche: but, in spite of that, not appreciated by the English world in general — though in no country were nouveaux riches more popular. Indeed, Lady Speyer’s neighbors entertained no liking for the subtleties of modern music of any kind. In the mean streets which surrounded the back of the house, all that the hard-working populace wanted to hear was “Home, Sweet Home” or, at the liveliest, “Pop Goes the Weasel. ” Having to rise early every day, these workers were roused to fury by perpetual musical parties that continued throughout the night, and, by a paradox, their anger reached its climax when an Alpine Band, of which Strauss was the patron, was brought to play in the music room at the back, and gave a concert of popular Tyrolean and Swiss music.

The sounds the band made were, indeed, unconventional, unusual in a city; the simple music of a mountain people, suffering from iodine deficiency, and intended to carry great distances from peak to peak, a translation of yodeling into other terms. After a few pieces had been played, assorted objects, chiefly fish heads — which seemed greatly in supply — began to fall among the startled guests, arrayed in their finery, in the garden-court, and the first casualty was Sir Claude Phillips, a rotten egg exploding on the large pearl stud which held together his expansive and exquisitely laundered shirt front, as he lingered outside, by the tethered water lily. . . . It was the forerunner of many an evening with the Marx Brothers.

It seemed singular that Lady Speyer, devoted to music though she was, seldom or never appeared at the opera: but it was said that there was never a box for her. In the world of opera and ballet, Lady Cunard reigned alone. Her boundless and enthusiastic love of music placed all those who enjoy opera in her debt: for it was largely her support, and the way she marshaled her forces, that enabled the wonderful seasons of opera and ballet in these years to materialize. There appeared to be no limit to the number of boxes she could fill. Her will power was sufficient, her passion for music fervent enough, to make opera almost compulsory for those who wished to be fashionable. She had grasped the fact that in the London of that time, in order to ensure the success of such an art luxury as Grand Opera, it was absolutely necessary to be able to rely upon a regular attendance by numskulls, nitwits, and morons addicted to the mode, even if they did not care in the least for music.

It was in Lady Cunard’s house at 20 Cavendish Square that I first met Delius, and for him I cherished a feeling of the deepest respect, not only for his music, with its warm, melodious climate, but because he was the one Englishman I have ever met who knew personally the giants of the PostImpressionist Movement, recognized them for what they were, and was privileged to frequent their studios. He used, for example, regularly to attend the Sunday evening at-homes of the Douanier Rousseau, social occasions that now exhale a legendary quality unrivaled in the art history of a period comparatively near to us. Thus Delius linked the present day to a fabulous past, and though then still in middle age was as solitary a survivor here as would be the last Blue Man in Tasmania.

I do not know that his looks precisely interpreted his nature. He was rather tall and thin, possessed a high, narrow forehead, an aquiline nose, delicately cut, and a finely drawn face, of the Roman intellectual type. He might, from his appearance, more easily have been a great lawyer than a great composer. In talking - and he was a voluble and delightful conversationalist — his tongue betrayed, not. an accent, exactly, but a slight foreign stress and lilt, attractive, and personal enough to make a contrast with the theories and speculations of which his soliloquies were full. The most gifted of English composers living at that time, head and shoulders above his buttercup-and-daisy confreres, a musician of the world, he found himself somewhat of a stranger in London. Indeed, without Sir Thomas Beecham’s enthusiasm to support him, his music would have scarcely obtained a hearing in England.

To revert to that evening, after dinner, Thomas Beccham played through some of the score of Der Rosenkavalier. I was to hear it many times that summer, superbly sung; but so far I had only been acquainted with the waltz, which for the two years preceding the war had formed the background to every dance, so that if I can ever catch the rhythm of it today, the world is again for the moment peopled with a legion of the young, enjoying themselves, who have long since ceased to exist. . . . Looking round, not even the most somber-minded of prophets in that flowering summer — for never can England have known a more ideal season — could have foreseen the extinction of the young men as a whole, within so short a space of time.

(To be concluded)