During 1959 Stravinsky completed three new works. The largest of these, Movements, for piano and orchestra (duration about ten minutes), was begun in 1958. It was commissioned by and dedicated to Margrit Weber, and was first performed by her, with the composer conducting, at a Stravinsky festival in New York in January this year. The other two works, both miniatures (their playing-time is about one minute each), were written in memory of two of Stravinsky's friends. The Double Canon (Raoul Dufy in memoriam), for string quartet, had its first performance at the same New York festival. The Epitaphium für das Grabmal des Prinzen Max Egon zu Fürstenberg (the patron of the Donaueschingen Festival), for flute, clarinet and harp, was first performed at Donaueschingen on 17 October, 1959.

Britten's Missa Brevis in D for three-part boys' voices and organ, op. 63, was ‘written for and performed by George Malcolm and the choristers of Westminster Cathedral on the occasion of Mr. Malcolm's retirement as organist and choirmaster there’. The manuscript bears the date Trinity Sunday, 1959, and the Mass received its first performance at Westminster on 22 July of the same year.

The Second Suite, op. 4, for small orchestra will no doubt play an important role in any critical study of Bartók's musical style. Though his earlier music, too, reveals his striving to create a specifically Hungarian art-music, until the Second Suite his Hungarian inflections were, by his own testimony, of the popular nineteenth-century variety best exemplified by Liszt's Rhapsodies. In contrast, the Second Suite contains elements of genuine Hungarian peasant music. At the same time, it is his last and perhaps best composition still within the framework of the Brahms-Strauss-Liszt idiom.

So reads the title page of ‘CANTATA ACADEMICA—CARMEN BASILIENSE’, completed in March 1959, and awaiting its first performance on 1 July, 1960, when Basel University celebrates its five-hundredth anniversary. The Latin text, compiled by Bernhard Wyss, is taken from the charter of the university and from older orations in praise of Basel. Britten has arranged the words to form ten set pieces and three recitatives, making thirteen sections in all. Discounting the final chorus, which is but a unifying return to the opening (musically speaking), it is no accident that the remaining formal divisions are governed by the number twelve. It is fascinating to discover that this is in fact a ‘serial’ work—entirely dependent on a note-row for its harmonic outline, though without serial order in harmonic detail. This is serialism of a very personal kind, so tightly connected with the form that it is the form itself—an integral part of the musical creation, valid only for this particular work; and although the idea is apparently simple it is filled with such a wealth of musical invention that one is left gasping at the ingenuity which makes it possible.

While Britten's only peer in English drama-through-music was probably unperturbed by a text which aped A Midsummer-Night's Dream without quoting a single line of Shakespeare, it is characteristic both of our time and of the man that Britten has worked on a text of almost formidable authenticity. The masterly abridgment and adaptation of the play, by the composer and Peter Pears, cannot concern us here, but it has helped to make possible highly integrated illuminations of some of the richest (and to a composer most hazardous) English verse. How Britten thrives on piquant juxtapositions of mood is a familiar wonder, but it is worth noting that the unity of (say) Winter Words is of a quite different order from that of the Nocturne: it is impossible to analyse musically what links the disconnected scenes into a coherent expression that is Hardy seen through Britten, whereas the common background of night and sleep imposes on poems from diverse sources a unity (not uniformity) of atmosphere that is naturally absorbed into the musical fabric. In the new opera, the three planes on which the fairies, the rustics and the lovers move demand radically differentiated musical idioms. The distinction is made absolute by numerous details, like Puck's spoken part (dancing takes over the interpretative role of melody) and Oberon's ‘supernatural’ casting as a countertenor, the tendencies towards a romantic Angst in the arioso of the lovers and towards a bucolic directness in the recitative of the rustics, and above all by orchestral identifications ranging from the wealth of percussion instruments associated with the supernaturals to the old trombone joke of the rustics' lion. We may regard this diversity as roughly analogous to that of the Hardy songs, with a composite meaning that is focussed in Shakespeare, but Britten also finds sources of intra-musical unity in the common backgrounds he draws to our notice, such as the Wood and Sleep.