Only one other death occurring in post-war Berlin has moved Germans and especially Berliners so deeply as the loss of Wilhelm Furtwängler—that of Ernst Reuter, Lord Mayor of this city during the years of suffering. It was as if a personal blow had struck not only the huge masses of regular concertgoers, but those people, too, who normally switch off their radios if a concert of classical music is announced. For both of them Furtwängler was more than just a great conductor, in him, they felt, the very essence of German music was embodied.

The ‘curious story’ that the Prologue promises has even as an opera preserved the character of a narrative. Neither the immediacy of the stage nor the emotional directness of music has excluded a certain detachedness of approach from the part of the storytellers—the librettist and composer. A succession of pictures passes before us: it is, in fact, the multitude of short scenes that, more than anything else, suggests a narration. The stage, on the other hand, presents the many episodes with great conciseness, as each scene is concerned with a single event—one instant, as it were, of the screw's turn.

When Dr. Albert Schweitzer published his great study of J. S. Bach in 1908 and surveyed a century of progress in the revival (or rescue) of the greatest composer's music, he asked: “Where can we hear, except rarely, performances of the suites, the Well-tempered Clavichord (sic), the Italian Concerto, the Chromatic Fantasia, the piano concerto in A minor, the C major Concerto for two pianos? Where are the Brandenburg orchestral concertos and the orchestral suites securely fixed in our programmes? Where are Bach's secular cantatas regularly given?” And he added: “Statistics of Bach performances on our concert programmes … would show that there are not too many towns where the auditor can really get to know Bach.”

Admirers of William Walton's music, aware of the specifically dramatic qualities in his symphonic and choral works, have often wondered whether his strong dramatic impulse would one day be set in motion by a great story and he would write an opera. It may well be that scanty opportunities of operatic production here, in the past, have discouraged him as they have discouraged many other British composers. Nevertheless there has been a remarkable revival of English opera in recent years, and the season of 1954 must be unique in bringing before the public four new full-length operas by major British composers.

From these citations alone it is evident that there are any number of doctrines now current about nationalism and internationalism in music, theories of all degrees of good sense, part-sense and downright nonsense. Mr. Keller enjoys himself hugely among them. For his views and conclusions, however, I must refer my readers to the article itself; for my own part I can do no more in my limited space than timidly put forward one or two reflections of my own.