How many people have heard of the Dubrovnik Festival of the Arts? Under what flat stone have our culture-mongers and journalists been sleeping? I confess that before I went there this summer I had only heard the vaguest rumours about it. And none of these had sharpened my interest—nowadays, so many holiday resorts try to stage some entertainments to attract tourists which they presume to call a Festival. At the most I expected one or two indifferent concerts, some folk-dancing and a local drama of only local interest. Certainly nothing had appeared in the English press to lead me to expect anything more than that. Now, having been there, I cannot help wondering whether the complete lack of news about Dubrovnik doesn't amount to an overt act of press censorship.

My second quotation, that superbly cutting account of a husband, occurs in The Awkward Age. The imagery might, under only a little pressure, be made to serve as a description of the present-day music critic, an odd accessory to the world of music who is only rarely (like the fire extinguisher) of practical use:—a bucket on a peg, indeed, and all too often an empty one.

Vaughan Williams' inspired attacks on musical history in The Making of Music (London, 1955) have come in for some heavy censure. “There is no physical reason,” he writes, “why an 18th-century composer should not have written the whole of Strawinsky and Schoenberg, provided that he had the pen and paper.” “Only the same reason,” Martin Cooper comments, “that prevents a monkey with a typewriter producing Hamlet.”

Prokofieff's seventh and last symphony presents a fluent, melodious aspect of the composer's many sided work: music that unfolds itself simply and naturally, individual certainly in its turn of phrase, but not provocative or challenging in the daring manner of Prokofieff's earlier works. The symphony thus represents a phase of Prokofieff's work, his last phase, and the curious fact here is that the many aesthetic and technical problems which this original composer raised in the Scythian Suite, The Gambler and the second symphony should have been resolved in music of such bland simplicity. If indeed one can refer to this work as a resolution of these problems at all. For the deliberately naiïve character of this last major work of Prokofieff, appealing as it is in its uncomplicated way, does not reflect that final triumph of serenity which one might have expected such a composer to have reached: it does not correspond to the other-worldly idealism of the late works of other composers of an adventurous turn of mind, such as Fauré and Vaughan Williams. Its conventionality, shot through with a sprightliness that is generally disciplined into polite musical behaviour but which nevertheless does occasionally assume the form of one of Prokofieff's ironic grimaces—this conventionality can only be interpreted as a surrender to the social demands which we know are from time to time re-imposed on Soviet composers.

Having visited the Bayreuth festival during each of its five post-war seasons, I have now seen all Wagner's music dramas staged in the festival theatre of his own design by his grandsons, Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner. The repertory was completed this summer by the addition of Der Fliegende Holländer, since in accordance with Wagner's wish, Rienbzi is never staged there, being too powerful an indictment of monarchy as represented by King Ludwig II, munificent patron and joint instigator of Bayreuth. The youthful essays Die Feen and Das Liebesverbot have, of course, never been staged there, and rarely elsewhere.

Through its creative wealth and technical importance, Brazilian music has assumed a prominent position in the context of contemporary composition. This blossoming, which is tied to such personalities as Villa-Lobos, Camargo Guarniere or Francisco Mignone, is related to the natural resources of the environment and stems from the inter-action of a whole gamut of values.