Forty years ago a phenomenon known as the Young British Composer was beginning to impress its image on the world, largely owing to the advocacy of the late Edwin Evans. Those of us who were young English critics at the time were naturally excited at the prospect of entering upon what promised to be a creative period in the country's music, unparalleled since, the 17th century.

The term was a somewhat vague one, for there was already in existence a generation of composers born round about the 70's and 80's of the last century who were just beginning to make their influence felt, and nobody had decided at what stage a musician ceased to be a Young British Composer.

Arthur Benjamin's Symphony, one of the composer's major works, was written during the summer holidays of 1943, 1944 and 1945 in Canada. Its intensely dramatic, at times violent character reflects, in the composer's own opinion, the atmosphere of the war years. The Symphony consists of the traditional four movements: a large-scale Allegro preceded by an Introductory Largo; a Scherzo; a slow movement and a final Allegro.

Hofmannsthal had no doubt that Die Frau ohne Schatten was the peak of his achievement as a librettist, and early on he wrote to Strauss that it should represent the summit of their fruitful collaboration. Strauss was at first equally enthusiastic. “The text is brilliant,” he wrote. “My dear Da Ponte, you have written your masterpiece.”

Both men were mature and self-aware artists and both were practising men of the theatre. Yet the world has not justified their faith in Die Frau ohne Schatten, which has this month made one of its rare reappearances as part of a cycle of Strauss operas at Zurich. The reasons usually given for its failure are not convincing. It is said, for instance, that the work makes such immense scenic demands that it can be produced satisfactorily only at great expense and in the largest theatres. The performance at the Zurich Stadttheater, which is quite modest in size, has however shown that with a little ingenuity an adequate production is within the range of the average medium-sized opera house.

John Cranko is a South African. He is twenty-six and he came to England a few weeks before his twentieth birthday. He knew no one in England at all except one young dancer from Capetown in the Sadler's Wells Theatre Company. But he knew exactly what he wanted and why he had come. He intended to be a choreographer and wanted to work, to that end, as a dancer in a first class company.

The musical public in London knows the work of a number of outstanding Soviet composers. The works of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian, Kabalevsky and others have been published and performed with success more than once in Great Britain. In talking with representatives of the British musical world I was able to convince myself of their lively interest in the work of these composers and in recent events in Soviet music generally. In the following pages I shall try to satisfy that interest to some extent, and to deal with some of the more important changes in Soviet music, which, as I think, have occurred during the last three or four years.

Even the most individual art has some roots in tradition; and the interest of Kodály's music arises from his faculty to elevate his national inheritance to an unmistakably personal language. Historic consciousness has always been a dominating trait both of the man and his art; he posscsses an extraordinary imagination for relating the spiritual experience of earlier periods to musical forms of contemporary validity. Thus a sixteenth century sermon became one of the choral masterpiece of modern times; a popular tale of Napoleonic times intiated the revival of Hungarian musical theatre; and his folksong choruses laid the foundations of the general musical culture in Hungary to-day.