It was surprising to discover that Professor E. J. Dent's English version of The Magic Flute has been in use in this country for thirty-five years or more. His version, made originally for Lilian Baylis's opera at the Old Vic in its semiamateur days, is familiar to all regular opera-goers here, for it has been in constant use since the opening of Sadler's Wells in 1930, and at the Royal Opera House since the establishment of National Opera there. Now, W. H. Auden, the librettist of The Rake's Progress and one of the foremost modern poets, has wandered into the thankless field of opera translation and the English version which comes from his hand and that of his collaborator, Chester Kallman, has already been used in a television performance of The Magic Flute in America on the occasion of the bi-centenary anniversary of Mozart's birth. It was much praised.

Kodály once remarked to me—we were talking about prodigies—that “nothing a musician does before the age of eighteen matters—what counts, is what he achieves between eighteen and seventy-five.…” It's quite likely that Kodály came to this conclusion through his personal experiences.

My Piano Fantasy, completed in January of this year, is a large-scale work in one movement, lasting half an hour in performance. A long and continuous one-movement form has always seemed to me one of the most taxing assignments a composer can undertake. The word assignment is perhaps ill-chosen, since this particular task was self-imposed. My idea was to attempt a composition that would suggest the quality of fantasy, that is, a spontaneous and unpremeditated sequence of “events” that would carry the listener irresistibly (if possible) from first note to last, while at the same time exemplifying clear if somewhat unconventional structural principles. “The spontaneous,” says Paul Valéry, “is the fruit of conquest.” It implies a creator who can “keep the unity of a work's ensemble while realizing the separate parts and without losing its spirit or nature on the way.” To give free rein to the imagination without loss of coherence, to be “fantastic” without losing one's bearings, is venturesome, to say the least. And yet a work of art seems to me the ideal proving ground for just such a venture. At any rate, my Piano Fantasy is such a venture.

It follows that. Folgerung. That doesn't follow. Non sequitur. Wherever we look, logical consistency or inconsistency is expressed metaphorically in terms of time. So elementally do we link “after” and “because” that the most common fallacy, by which historians make a living, is post hoc ergo propter hoc: “thereafter, hence because of it.” Conversely, we should say that propter hoc ergo post hoc must inevitably be valid: “because of it, hence thereafter.” There is, however, one respect in which this need not be held to be true—the teleological. Causa finalis, the ultimate purpose, lies inevitably in the future, as indeed does every purpose. Tomorrow's concert causes today's rehearsal. True, your reason for rehearsing necessarily precedes your rehearsal, but the cause of your reason may be said to lie in the future inasmuch as the future is foreseeable. In this sense, then, propter hoc ergo post hoc can be fallacious too. Tomorrow you have a concert. It doesn't follow that you want a rehearsal today; it precedes.

The composers of the second generation, whose personality and achievement were described in the preceding section, have all had opportunities of obtaining, for some of their music at least, a hearing abroad. Indeed some, like Géza Frid, Tibor Harsányi, Mátyás Seiber, had already decided, at the beginning of their careers, to settle abroad permanently and so, though belonging to this generation, cannot properly be included in the present survey.