MUSIO.
" LISTENING-IN " TO OPERA.
THERE could not be a greater contrast to the first performance of the Magic Flute than the Covent Garden performance of January 5th when, for the first time in England, opera was
broadcasted. In 1791, in a little Viennese theatre, the audience wavered between disapproval and mild applause ; in 1923, in addition to the audience at Covent Garden Opera House, a supernumerary audience of many thousands, scattered over Greater London and far into the country beyond, heard the opera with almost equal clearness and possibly with far more comfort. It is, indeed, time for everyone who has not yet done so to sit up and take notice of this new development of science. The best performances of the best music, pre viously accessible only to the few, can now be brought into every home in England. Wireless has made the universality of music a hard, indisputable fact ; and it is, incidentally, a means of spreading civilization on an unimaginable scale. Paderewski, if he returns to the world of music, will not play to the limited audience of a single hall : all England will be able to hear him if it wishes. And if ever the first performance of some modern work arouses the expectation that greeted Scriabin's Prometheus, no enterprising evening paper need bring out a special report on the night of the performance ; the work will have been discussed already in a hundred thousand homes.
A surprisingly large number of otherwise well-informed people still think of broadcasting as a grandiose fraud. No doubt they are influenced by memories of the early gramo- phones, when, amid the splutterings of imperfect reeords, the tenors and sopranos of twenty years ago emitted guttural and terrifying gurgles like the suffocating victims of some real Grand Guignol. Perhaps the uninitiated do not realize that inaudible symphonies and silent operas are flowing nightly above their housetops, that the sky has become a vast reservoir of dumb music which an absurdly simple apparatus will change into living sound, but from a not unnatural distrust of human ingenuity they prefer to remain in a state of stuffy unenlightenment.
Listening-in is not very different from receiving a message on the telephone, except that the transmitting instruments are far more sympathetic. But the listener-in to music will take some time to become accustomed to the new conditions, which entail an almost complete isolation of the sense of hearing. In the concert room most people are stimulated by at least three different senses ; consequently when they listen-in they actually hear music for the first time. At the opera this is still more true. For one thing, the listener-in is deprived of mental participation in the performance, and this psycho-analysts tell us is essential to our full enjoyment.
Wireless relegates the listener to a position somewhere behind the scenes. He is an eavesdropper, as it were, and an impene- trable wall separates him from the performers. During pauses in the music he can hear the bodiless singers moving about the stage. From the rustling of a gown or the clanking of a sword-hilt he can guess at some invisible gesture ; while a bow dropped in the orchestra or a burst of applause from the audience will strengthen the illusion of reality.
The human voice is transmitted with surprising verisimili- tude. Indeed, the listener-in can hear with almost greater ease than the majority of the people in the auditorium, for he is freed from the many distractions of the theatre. Of course, there can, and will be, improvements. To my ear, orchestral tutus are often sodden and dead in tone, and while the timbre of the wood-wind remains unimpaired and the brass satisfactory if less obtrusive, the airy brilliance of the strings is lost. Yet the whole effect is little short of miraculous in its approach to truth.
I had better say that this opinion applies only to listening- in by means of earpieces ; the more or less communal advan- tages of the device known as the " loud-speaker " are counter-
balanced by a grating sound that continues throughout the transmission. In order to be heard by this method, the
sound has to be magnified, and as small sounds from the audi- torium and the stage are necessarily magnified as well as the music, the present disadvantages need no emphasis. How- ever, these cavils are merely split-hairs. Broadcasting will do far more for music than the camera has done for the arts of painting and sculpture.
" Opera by wireless " has been so popular that the British Broadcasting Company has since transmitted the majority of operas performed at Covent Garden by the British National Opera Company during the last fortnight of their season. Wagner, Humperdinck, and Verdi were most satisfactory, Puccini stood revealed in his cheapness, while the too infrequent arias and ensembles of the Marriage of Figaro must have dispensed musical culture of the right kind, though its vast stretches of spoken dialogue probably puzzled many listening- in, for Da Ponte's libretto, I should imagine, is unintelligible to those who do not know what is happening on the stage. In addition to opera, the British Broadcasting Company transmit their own concerts, and while public taste is too rigorously considered, the programmes are often good. Piano solos are perhaps the least satisfactory. The transmitting instruments cannot digest the highest notes of the piano ; they reproduce as mere woody taps of an indefinite pitch. But with the performances of Beethoven and Schumann Quartets by the Kendall quartet I had little fault to find. No one can object to the blatantly popular items in the pro- grammes. They are economically necessary, like the Saturday Promenade Concerts. But some definite system of programmes, similar to the Promenade programmes, would spare the listener-in the perorations of a comedian or the cheap fami- liarities of a fox-trot when he has adjusted his instrument solely to hear the Unfinished Symphony. The would-be listener-in must be sure of acquiring reliable instruments such as can be bought from the British Broadcasting Company, and he must be within a reasonable distance of the transmitting station, for at a distance of fifteen or twenty miles the volume of sound is considerably reduced in volume ; but that again depends upon the power of the (The usual " Recreations of London " will be found on pp. 260-13
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