A century ago the history of the Crystal Palace began brilliantly with a mighty outpouring of music—and music was to be a consolation and a saving grace in the many disappointments and failures of its old age. The story of the Crystal Palace was a story of melodious achievement from the almost miraculous speed of its birth to the even greater rapidity of its destruction.

Every age considers that its own problems, musical and other, are the toughest in human annals. Even so, we who have lived all or part of the way from 1900 to 1950 may reasonably claim that the half-century behind us was one of the most perverse and teasing that music critics, whether professional or amateur, have ever endured.

Germany 1944: aerial bombardment; retreating troops already at the frontiers; total restriction of all cultural activites; the theatres closed down. People in Germany cowering ever closer together under the daily lash of this mad war frenzy, questioned the very meaning of existence. They could only wait for Zero-day. The collapse. The future lay in darkness.

The list of Darius Milhaud's operas, leaving aside Les Saintes Maries de la Mer (a six-hundred-page score composed at the age of fifteen and subsequently burnt) consists of sixteen works, ranging from La Brebis Egarée (1910) to Bolivar (1943).

It is difficult—and probably useless—to try and make an a priori synthesis of this output, whose essential features stand out naturally from a panoramic glance even as rapid as this one. Indeed, Milhaud has never created in systematic fashion; his researches into the general domain of musical aesthetics and language have in no way been guided by preconceived ideas, and in particular he has never composed music for the stage (which is one of the most important aspects of his work) except as a result of chance meetings, either with poets or dramatists, or with poetical or dramatic themes and texts.