Music: K. P. E. Bach

To a very musicianly audience in Manhattan, Harpsichordist Wanda Landowska proved last week that there was more than one Bach worthy of mention. On the occasion of her appearance as soloist with the Flonzaley Quartet she played, for the first time in the U. S., Karl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s* (son of the great Johann Sebastian) Concerto in G Minor for Harpsichord and String Quartet, scored by herself from the manuscript parts found in the sale of Prieger’s collection at Bonn.

Said Critic Lawrence Gilman of the New York Herald Tribune: “The whole of it is vital and dis-tinguished music, but the slow movements, the largo, is not only an exquisite piece of writing, but it is charged with a depth of feeling, a poetic beauty, a musing, tenderness. …”

In Milan

For an account of the Italian premiere of The Martyrdom of San, Sebastian, an opera by Gabriele d’Annunzio with a score by Debussy see ITALY, p. 15.

Premieres

La Vida Breve, opera in two acts by Manuel de Falla, based on the libretto by Carlos Fernandez-Shaw, had its first U . S. performance last week at the Metropolitan Opera House, Manhattan. Paco, traditional scion of a wealthy family in Granada, seduces Salud, a black-eyed gypsy girl, deserts her to marry the more suitable Carmela. Salud would have him back, goes to Carmela’s house on the evening of the wedding festivities, sings the warm, fragrant gypsy melody that won him first, dies of grief when he repulses her. On such an old, old story, unfattened by dramatic detail, the young De Falla wrote his opera, years before he was capable of El Amor Brujo or El Retablo de Maesa Pedro,** before he had any real understanding of the theatre, when music of one kind or another was all the same to him—simple, lovely, languorous. Lucrezia Bori, herself as black-eyed, as Spanish as any Spanish gypsy girl, was Salud—lovely, languorous, like De Falla’s music and the sleepy, colorful settings of Joseph Urban.

Le Rossignol, fairy opera in one act and three scenes, by Igor Stravinsky, followed La Vida Breve, made two U. S. premieres in a single afternoon at the Metropolitan. The story was adapted from the tale of Hans Andersen—a fisherman paddling his boat, drawing his nets, hears the nightingale; the Emperor hears it, so does his Bonze, so does his cook, who finally persuades it to come and live at court. Japanese ambassadors come bringing the Chinese Emperor a mechanical nightingale, and the stupid, stupid courtiers, forgetting their own perfect nightingale, applaud the artificial one, and the real bird flies away. . . . The Emperor is dying and the nightingale sings again. Death stops to listen, steals away, leaves the Emperor, enlightened, happy. Stravinsky, strange, strident, sardonic, owed many of his most striking effects to Serge Soudeikine, who in designing the sets dared to do as much with wild, intoxicating color as Stravinsky did with his horns and strings rhd piano. Marion Talley (TIME, Mar. 1) was the Nightingale, never once seen. She stood in the orchestra pit with the players, right in front of Conductor Tullio Serafin, sang difficult music creditably, won curtain calls for herself alone, when it was all over, from an audience that found Stravinsky’s cacophonies a bit unintelligible, Soudeikine’s color a bit dazzling.

Contest

Five hundred students, representing 15 colleges,*** met last week in Manhattan for the tenth annual Intercollegiate Glee Club contest, given by the Intercollegiate Music Council. Each of the 15 clubs sang Horatio Parker’s “Lamp in the West,” each sang its own college song and another song of its own choosing. Judges were Harry O. Osgood, associate editor and critic of Musical Courier; Mark Andrews, famed conductor of male choruses; Stephen C. Townsend, director of the chorus of the Society of the Friends of Music. They put their heads together, awarded Wesleyan first place with 265% credits, Princeton second with 262 points, University of Kansas third. Notably absent was the Harvard Glee Club, withdrawn from the contest because it had found the prize song by the late Professor Parker of Yale not of a high enough musical standard.

*From 1738-1767 accompanist and Kammermusikus to famed Flutist Frederick the Great.

**Puppet opera given in Manhattan earlier in the season by the League of Composers.

***Amherst, Columbia, Dartmouth, Fordham, New York University, Pennsylvania State, Princeton, Yale, Wesleyan, Syracuse, Ohio Wesleyan, Wisconsin, Kansas, North Carolina, Furman.