THE LONDON MUSIC FESTIVAL
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR]
SIR,—I ask the hospitality of your columns because I fear that many people may form the opinion, after reading Mr. Dyneley Hussey's article in your issue of December i6th, that the London Music Festival is an attempt to reproduce the Continental variety of the species in England. This is not the case.
Festivals of the Continental type are essentially exotic growths, having a brilliant and spectacular existence which is imposed from without and does not spring from the life of the place itself. The performances are not such as a provincial centre could provide unaided, the prices are certainly not those which a provincial public could be expected to pay, and the audiences are, for the most part, not indigenous music- lovers—if indeed some of them are music-lovers at all.
The London Music Festival aims at expressing the rich and varied musical life of London, within a comparatively short compass of time. It must therefore be a big Festival because London is the greatest city in the world. It must be wide in its scope because London's music, the finest that can be offered anywhere, has no practical boundaries. Mr. Hussey's doubt whether this will in fact be a festival is rather like denying the title of symphony to a work of Berlioz merely because the composer has employed more instruments than Haydn. Perhaps the fact that the London Music Festival will be too big for "everyone attending the occasion to see and meet everyone else every day" may not be so very great a loss. Was not that the element which, at one foreign festival, caused music to yield place to fashion ? What, in other .words, do we mean by a Festival ?
Those responsible for the planning of the London Music Festival believe that London with in vast resources, its historic atmosphere and its breadth of mental outlook is the ideal place for a Festival the like of which the world has not experienced before. There is ample evidence coming into this office daily that hundreds of lovers of music in Great Britain and overseas share that belief.—Yours, &c., CEDRIC WALLIS, Secretary, London Music Festival. so New Bond Street, London, W.I.
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