I first met Sir Thomas Beecham in New York and in the Green Room at Carnegie Hall after a concert. Although I cannot remember which orchestra he was conducting, it was possibly the Rochester Symphony Orchestra. Due, I was told, to various feuds with important managements, Sir Thomas never conducted either the New York Philharmonic or the Boston Symphony Orchestras, at least not during the period I knew him there, from 1941 until his return to London in 1944. I had been introduced by his assistant John Barnett and was also armed with the encouragement of critic-composer Virgil Thomson, a friend and admirer of Sir Thomas, who had heard John rehearsing my overture, The New Age. This work was later rejected by the committee of the New York City Symphony, a group of unemployed musicians working under the W.P.A., a kind of dole. Partly from anger at what he thought an unjust decision, Barnett arranged my introduction to Sir Thomas.

Sir Thomas Beecham was deeply venerated in the United States, both for his musicianship and for his quick and acidulous sense of humour. Although music lovers everywhere attended his concerts knowing full well that they would hear a definitive and tasteful performance, one had the feeling too that much of his audience hopefully anticipated some kind of amusing explosion from the famous maestro.

There are those artists who disarm one's critical faculties and to whom a sense of personal gratitude governs all one's attitudes. So far as the present writer is concerned, Beecham was one of that number; to pretend, therefore, that these notes are other than subjective appreciation (an opportunity to bid farewell to a departed hero) would be not only dishonest but so transparently so as to add stupidity to deceit.

Recent opportunities given by the Third Programme for hearing Britten's chamber music again may have helped to dispel the faintly patronising air which has often been adopted towards all his instrumental works by those who profess to find there something less than the overwhelming mastery of his word settings. The two quartets show a marked originality of structural proportion as well as that flair for textures we have taken for granted in no other English composer in his early thirties, and the Lachrymae meditations reveal unsuspected shades of sombre colouring. Britten's return to this field after more than a decade arouses keen expectancy, particularly if we reflect on his artistic development during those years. Without totally effacing the impression of almost prodigal spontaneity that has been his stamp since the earliest works, he has effected an inner economy of material, often by motivic practices of unusual subtlety and strength. Outwardly too, with Winter Words and Turn of the Screw, we have begun to recognize a laconic utterance that is very compelling: it is seen in individual movements like the fifth Chinese Song or the Shakespeare setting in the Nocturne, but it also makes possible the changing vignettes of the first act of Midsummer Night's Dream, and the fleet progress of the Cantata Academica through thirteen sections in some twenty minutes.

1—What follows is notes, made at various stages and on a variety of topics. Few of these remarks make any pretence to completeness, and I have not attempted to fill in the gaps and ‘cover’ any particular field thoroughly. Few of these remarks follow on from one to the next, so they may be read at random.

Perhaps it will be helpful to imagine in what rôles the various remarks are made; whether as composer, listener, interpreter, critic, publicity man, or simply theoretician. I have discussed only those things which concern, or have concerned me directly (and this may be taken as an apology).

The following discussion between Olivier Messiaen and Bernard Gavoty, music critic of Figaro, took place at a Youth Music concert in Paris in February of this year immediately before a performance of Messiaen's Trois petites Liturgies de la présence divine. It was subsequently published in the Journal Musical Français to whom we are indebted for permission to print the following translation.