MUSIC
THIS last week has seen a recrudescence of the monster performances which became popular in England in the second half of the eighteenth century and dominated the whole conception of choral singing in England during the nineteenth. Both the performance of Messiah on Wednesday, with massed choirs over a thousand strong, and the festival concert of British music on Friday, with two orchestras playing together, were charity performances, it is true —in the sense that the newly inaugurated Henry Wood Concert Society naturally needs funds and the Musicians' Benevolent Asso- ciation has so many calls on its purse that no means of raising money can be neglected. Even so, it is significant that the surest way of raising money is still a mammoth Messiah, an indication that quantity rather than quality is still the chief concern of a majority of concert-goers. Messiah is an accepted masterpiece, but I am not sure that the only performance which can now have any real musical interest would not be one organised by a conductor com- pletely outside the English tradition. I personally should like to hear a small choir and orchestra and four first-rate soloists, preferably Italian but in any case all trained in the bel canto school, conducted by Victor de Sabata. I have never yet heard soloists who could do more than "manage " the florid ornamentation of Rejoice greatly or do justice to the brazen tones of Thou shalt break them. Handel was an Italian in his vocal writing, and there are passages in Messiah which are as far beyond the range of English oratorio- singers as an opera by Bellini is beyond Sadler's Wells—and for exactly the same reason.
The British music played at the Albert Hall on St. Cecilia's Day and the sixth of the seven concerts of the Delius Festival at the Central Hall the day before raised several interesting points. We are in danger of losing our heads over Purcell surely, in exactly the same way as the French at one time lost their heads over Lully, and for the same reasons. Purcell and Lully were largely neglected soon after their deaths, the one overshadowed at once by Handel, the other first by Rameau and then by Gluck. It seems to be a mixture of nationalist prejudice and an exaggerated desire to make amends for past neglect which is now placing Purcell on such a very high pedestal.
Delius is a much stranger case of inflation. Here is an artist with a vein of unquestionable originality ; a musician-poet with an exquisite sense of ordhestral colour and a haunting sense of the evanescence of beauty ; a pessimistic pantheist of the 'nineties whose music creates an Oriental Nirvana, a prolonged " mood " in which harmonies shift and shimmer kaleidoscopically. The vocal music of Delius, especially the songs for solo voice, repeat the process familiar in his orchestral works by which any melody, any line, that appears immediately becomes a melisma, an ornamental phrase varied and repeated but never growing or developing into a melodic line. The static and amorphous quality of his inspiration absolutely disqualifies him from the larger forms, and his genre is really the Stimmungsbild—the " mood-picture "—popularised by Grieg, whom he greatly admired. Grieg, with surer artistic taste, confined his moods within small frames, but Delius allows them to expand ad libitum: and, what is worse, it is always the same mood. At best the interest remains poetical, but Delius had a hankering after the philosophical, and then we have the unhappy spectacle of an artist trying to erect his sensibility into a philosophical system. (We are to hear the typically namcd Mass of Life in December.)
Mahler and Delius toth suffered from this passion for the grandiose, and in each case it did harm to their music. Yet thanks to indefatigable and skilled propaganda the British public have been persuaded to accept Delius as a major composer and to swallow all his works without distinction—from the beautiful and original miniatures for orchestra to the really ghastly songs per- formed last Thursday—as the products of genius. I often think that the most cheering sign of musical vitality in England would be a chorus of hisses and catcalls by some section of the audience at a concert—and I should not mind if I happened to think the work which was hissed a masterpiece. MARTIN COOPER.
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