MUSIC
I THINK that most honest people will admit that they found Wozzeck in concert form almost unbearable, because practically unintelligible. Following the text and stage directions (more helpful than the music) in a score and drawing on memories of stage performances in the past, I was lucky • but even so I felt that I was grasping at the shadow of the work. Wozzeck is excellent theatre ; but imagine a concert performance of Verdi's Falstaff, where the music and the drama are interwoven about as inextricably. There at least you would have the singing voice ; but Sprechgesong, effective in the theatre as part of the stylised realism of the piece, is meaningless and even ludicrous in the Albert Hall. The vast orchestra, which should, of course, be in a pit beneath the singers, engulfed them on the platform and was altogether too prominent, whereas it should only provide comment, parallel or illustration of the nightmare that is being enacted on the stage.
I cannot think that those people who speak sentimentally about Wozzeck as " the tragedy of the common man " can ever have seen a performance,- or even a score, of Berg's work. The whole interest of the piece lies in its exploration of the borderland between sanity and insanity, and although the "common man" is used to many compliments nowadays, I very much doubt if he would take identi- fication with Wozzeck very kindly. Heinrich Nillius and Suzanne Danco sang and spoke-sang excellently as Wozzeck and Marie, and the whole performance, for which in spite of the foregoing criticism we should be most grateful to-the B.B.C., was on a high level.
Bruckner's Third Symphony, played by the London Philharmonic Orchestra under van Beinum on March i7th, seemed remarkably short and on a comparatively small scale. The Scherzo is a wholly successful dance movement, light-hearted and vigorous and worthy of the comparison which it invites with the Scherzos of Beethoven. A great deal has been written of the "religious inspiration" of Bruckner's music, as of Franck's ; but do lack of sophistication and great familiarity with the organ really constitute anything per se religious ? If we knew nothing of Bruckner's life and personality should we really be able to find evidence of religious faith in his music ? Or is it merely that his orchestration and his habits of writing reveal the organist and there is in our minds an association— purely fortuitous of course—between organs and churches ? Cer- tainly it is a strange fact, if Bruckner is so essentially a religious composer, that his greatest admirers seem to be people of German race but not in any way remarkable for their piety.
I suspect that the appeal of his music, like that of Elgar to English- men, is something more subtle. I know the Austrian countryside just well enough to get a sniff of it in Bruckner's music and Austrians quite well enough to recognise the Austrian in the charm of Bruck- ner's episodes and the good-humoured clumsiness with which he strings them together. That Bruckner wrote his music A.M.D.G. is really neither here nor there; so, no doubt, did Sir Frederick Ouseley and John Bacchus Dykes. Reputation rests on perform- ance, not intention ; and if, as we had hoped, the world one day really gets " smaller " and Austria is within easy holiday reach, this will do more to make Bruckner's music popular than would a religious revival.
Lovers of flamenco and Spanish dancing in general should not miss Mariemma, Paco Fernandez and Jose Toledano dancing at the Princes Theatre—or Paco de la Isla playing the guitar. This is the perfect integration of music with dancing, where heels and castanets are the audible expression of the dancers' own rhythm and the guitarist, seated almost among the dancers, gives and receives innumerable minute stimuli such as no conductor in the orchestral pit can ever hope to exchange with his dancers.
MARTIN COOPER.
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