Melville's Billy Budd is the culmination of a lifetime's spiritual agony, and it is impossible to value this curious allegory at its true worth without studying it carefully in the light of its author's private despairs. It may be that the publicity that Britten's opera is sure to attract will focus the reluctant interest of the public at last upon a writer who for nearly a century (though he has been only sixty years dead) has been the dimmest of shadows for all but the occasional addict. In England his name is still the barest rumour. Moby Dick has had its boosts, Typee the popular reprintings owed to an entertaining travelogue; yet none of these temporary quirks of fortune has aroused more than the most cursory interest in the mind that created them. Projected into posterity as a crude adventurer who had lived among cannibals and hunted whales before turning these experiences into pleasurable adventure-stories, the richest and profoundest imagination in American literature still remains virtually unrecognised over half the English-speaking world. America is beginning to acknowledge him at last; but in this country indifference is still his lot. Some of his works, I am glad to say, are being reprinted and enjoyed again; but until he is accepted and appreciated as a coherent whole, the understanding given to isolated parts of his work will be at best partial and inadequate.

Johnson's statement reads like a paradox, like one of those ponderous challenges to accepted opinion that sometimes he delighted to hurl out in conversation. It expresses an attitude that is at the opposite pole to the conventional eighteenth-century view of the British Navy. His lifelong friend David Garrick summed up this romantic view of naval life in his song, Hearts of Oak.

When the curtain rises Captain Edward Fairfax Vere, former commander of His Majesty's Ship Indomitable, now on old man, is reflecting on life as experience has shown it to him—a confusion of good and evil, and the good never perfect. Trying to guide others, Vere was lost himself. Yet he has been blessed, been saved. By whom? He recalls an event in the summer of 1797, during the French wars, and after the Mutiny at the Nore. The stage begins to lighten and his thought takes visible shape in

Producer:The main problem seems to me to decide how far we are going to be realistic and how far not. For me the most realistic scene is the Battle, Act III, i., where the crew have very definite things to do, loading guns and firing them, stowing hammocks and so on. Then the mist descends again and they are cut off from the enemy. But the mist is as much a mist of doubt and fear in the mind of Vere when he is about to close with Claggart at the beginning and finally at the end of the scene. And these dual planes of action seem to me to run throughout the opera, as they do in Melville.

Why is it that the Italian composers who were born around 1880 did not continue the tradition of their immediate predecessors, but turned to other sources in search of a guiding star—to Gregorian plainchant, for example, to the madrigalists of the Renaissance, to the instrumental composers of the eighteenth century, even to contemporary Europe? It would take too long to go into the reasons here, but it is an undoubted fact that these composers are not so much sons of their fathers as of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, and even, so to speak, of their non-Italian cousins; and the same may be said of the composers born at the beginning of this century, in whom the situation repeated itself, although in a somewhat modified form.

Much is written about the gulf between contemporary art on the one hand and the public on the other. But does this really obtain? Is it impossible for a great creative artist to be understood by his contemporaries? There is one solution of this problem; ground carefully cultivated will bear fruit earlier than ground that has been neglected. When one begins with virgin soil, that is to say with the sensitive but musically undeveloped child, then it is that the best results will be attained.

The second version of Richard Strauss's Waltz Munich had its first performance at the opening concert of the 4th International Music Festival in Vienna. Fritz Lehman conducted, as Dr. Karl Bohm had been taken ill.

In the last issue of TEMPO it was stated incorrectly that The Rise of English Opera, by Eric Walter White, was published by John Lehmann Ltd. at the price of 12s. od. The correct price is 21s. od.