'MUSIC
A WELCOME RETURN
ELEVEN years, eleven hard tragic years which dissipated, memory, have passed since Miss Kitty- Cheatham sang negro melodies to us and charmed London by her unusual interpre- tation of children's songs in that tense, nervous summer just before the War. Perhaps the passage of time, in which so much has been forgotten, was responsible for the thinness of the audience at her reappearance at the Aeolian Hall a few nights ago. Time has touched the years, to a certain extent (only a very limited extent) time has touched her voice, but the tiresome thing has not, nor can it, touch her art. That remains the intimate, spiritual little gem it has always been since the day she slipped (smiling, you may be sure) into the world to be- Yvette Guilbert's only rival. Hear her sing some crooning lullaby from the plantations of Virginia, for it is in this primitive negro music (so far removed from the crude invitations to return to Dixie which are always being shouted at us) that Miss Kitty Cheatham is at her best : watch her face with its rainbow of expressions. You will be taken back to the days before the abolition of slavery : you will forget her modem evening frock or the conventional concert platform in Bond Street. In front of you there will be a woman whose artistic intelligence is so high that all the horrors of what that old slavery must have been, all the passion for liberty smoulder- ing in the breasts of the slaves, all their pathetic craving for some better world (they knew not where to find Jerusalem) will make you uncomfortably uncertain whether you have deserved your comfortable chair or not. I wish more of these exquisite songs had been given in the programme and less of the nursery rhymes, delightfully though these were rendered.
I must place on record the fact that, since the War, a new 'and subtle seriousness seems to have enveloped Miss Kitty Cheatham. There are just a few occasions when the artist is in some danger of being lost in the propagandist. Yet who can quarrel with her on this score when the propaganda is so admirable as the drawing together of the Anglo-Saxon peoples ? I only beg of her not to let it invade her music, which should be above all national barriers.
E. S. A.
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