Bartók Competition - October 1948: A Tribute to Bartók

Extract

When I was approached recently by a music-lover of Los Angeles, one of those typical “hommes de bonne volonté” full of utopian schemes, and when he expounded, to me his idea of an “International Musical Olympiad,” I declined to enter into discussion on the manifestly unrealizable project (or rather, dream). I pointed out to him the unpropitiousness of the year 1948 for such a vast undertaking, the shortness of time, the absence of “goodwill,” of harmony, of co-operativeness in the atmosphere, and so on and so forth.