23 MARCH 1951, Page 14

MUSIC ONLY five years lie between SchOnberg's tone-poem Pelleas and

Melisande, composed in 1902-3, and Hoist's chamber opera Savitri of 1908, two works which have been heard in London this last week. Schonberg's op. 5 is a monstruAr informe, ingens, hor- rendutn of a piece, his Melisande a mountainous Laestrygonian woman whom one might well hate. The vast orchestra and ingenious counterpoint of significatory themes in every way con- tradict Maeterlinck's fey, will-less drama, which calls, for some form of understatement (whether Debussy's or another) instead of the full Wagnerian apparatus of emphasis, where colossal orchestral climaxes succeed one another with a regularity and frequency which quickly destroy their effectiveness. This is not to deny technical skill or the power to create moments of beauty, overripe but real, to Schonberg, who was still working wholly in the Wagnerian world and reproduced most of the faults of his idol Mahler—musical elephantiasis, shapelessness and an emotionalism of literary origin—without any of his original characteristics.

Pelleas and Melisande is, in fact, something like a parody of the post-Wagnerian tone-poem. When, a few years later, Schiin- berg developed a deliberate and conscious vein of originality, it was in the devising of an intellectual method rather than in the creation of a new, personal world of musical feeling. He invented a new musical language, rather as Dr. Zamenhof invented Esperanto ; but what he has expressed in this new language has been fundamentally what he was expressing before, only in com- pressed, tabloid form instead of at great length and with the full splendour of traditional syntax.

Hoist, too, started as an enthusiastic Wagnerian ; but his development was organic and instinctive rather than intellectually determined. The drama of Savitri is wholly interior and psycho- logical, not yet ascetic as in Hoist's mature manner but already self-denying in the matter of orchestral richness and exterior action. The orchestration is for double string quartet and bass, two flutes, cor anglais and women's chorus (used wholly instru- mentally); the scenery and action are reduced to a minimum. It is difficult for a Westerner to use the Hindu scriptures naturally. without an air of affectation, and Western audiences find the idea of Maya—the belief that all phenomena are an illusion—as foreign to their habits of mind as the practice of Yoga to their habits of body.

Hoist used this Hindu atmosphere with all the conviction of the enthusiastic amateur of Oriental soul-states, and he found, to express the exotic, a form of melodic recitative often beautiful and telling in itself as well as apt for his purpose. The idiom of Savitri is a strange compound of folk-song and Wagnerian lyrical expansion, and it is paradoxical that one of his earliest essays in the sensitive setting of an English text should be based on a translation from the Sanskrit. The part of Death—always a dangerous character on the stage,- lyrical or otherwise—contains the most forcible music that Hoist had so far written ; and although he had not yet achieved naturalness and his melodic lines often seem contrived and experimental, they are already intensely personal, unspoiled by the reminiscences of other styles which sometimes flaw the music of Savitri herself and of her husband Satyavan.

At the Victoria and Albert Museum, where a concert perform- ance of the work was given on March 18th, Roderick Jones contrived, even in a boiled shirt, to make Death an impressive and powerful figure, a being of a different order of creation from Elsie Morison's Savitri and Max Worthley's Satyavan. Perhaps Savitri's part is the most difficult. Every time that her passionate pleading attains a truly lyrical stature and becomes, as it were, air-borne, the wings on which Hoist makes her rise are too plainly borrowed from the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth ; and it is astonishing what rich and full sonority Hoist achieves with his small orchestra on these occasions. But they contradict both the mood and the manner of the rest of the piece and impose a stylistic strain on any singer. John Pritchard, who conducted the orchestra and the women's choir, had plainly given much thought and care to Hoist's score, and it is probable that occasional lack of balance in the lyrical climaxes was the fault of the composer and inherent