THE GRAMOPHONE Incorporating VOX, THE RADIO CRITIC and BROADCAST REVIEW

London 0foe : lOA, Soho Square,

London, W.l.

Vol. VIII . .

Edited by COMPTON MACKENZIE

MAY, 1931

TELEPHONE : Regent 7976, 7977.

TBLEGIUMS: Parmarlo, Rath, London.

No. 96

EDITORIAL

N o sooner have the reverbera.tions of the emotion over foreign recordings begun to Tumble a l i t t le less loudly than I find myself being threatened by the l ightning of those who disapprove strongly of my having commended the publication or abridged operas. Now really I cannot see any more artistic harm in publishing abridged operas than in publishing abridged books. The possession of an abridged opera ought not to injure i ts owner 's ability to appreciate complete opera. I believe THE GRAMOPHONE can claim some of the credit for persuading the recording companies to give us complete quartets and quintets instead of as in old days parts of isolated movements. And what, I ask myself sadly, has been the result? So l i t t le public support that nowadays we do not even get isolated movements of quartets. Instead, a great combination of players like the Lener String Quartet is producing on ten-inch Columbia discs arrangements of Chopin's Etudes and Musical Moments of Schubert. Our old friend the piano has been used like a painter's lay figure and draped with string trimmings to gratify a public so prejudiced against chamber music that i t will apparently buy an unnecessary arrangement of a composition written for the piano, opus number and all, when i t will refuse to buy even an isolated movement from a string quartet. No one has recognised more "fully than I have the tax upon the music lover's pocket which these complete works impose; but unless the testers of the Sales Department of the Columbia Company have all gone off their heads, which is not an explanation I am inclined to accept, the issue of these decked-out piano compositions means that there is a public demand for them. , The Lener Quartet, indeed, is transforming itself as gracefully as i t can into a restaurant accompaniment. You can almost hear the waiter ask if you will take black or white coffee as you turn over from the Etude to the Musical Moment.

Th~rouble is that those who have any money now to spend on gramophone records prefer, since electrical recording came in, to spend i t on big orchestral works, f'or whereas in pre-eledrical days the com hinat ion of two violins, a viola, and a violoncello was comparatively much morc like the original than the full orchestra ever succeeded in being, nowadays that advantage has been lost. Personally, I applaud the Polydor system of putting a movement from a trio or a quartet at the end of a symphony. For instance, at the end of their admirable Pastoral Symphony you will find a movement from Beethoven's so-called Street Song Trio, and at the end of their splendid Fourth Symphony of Brahms you will find a movement from the same composer's Quartet in A. I suggest to Columbia and H.M.V. that when they have a spare side at the end of a symphony they should make use of some of their now almost unemployed quartet artists in chamber music.

To return to the question of abridged operas. The cost of a complete opera is never less than £3 lOs., and sometimes runs up to five or six guineas. Those who can affo·rd to buy a complete opera will buy a complete opera, but the rest of the public can only afford to buy a single record :Prom these albUlns or go without. After all, we should surely get a better idea of an opera from an abridged version than from three or four arias sung by different singers and purchased at different t imes! Some of the later and cheaper editions of my novels have been abridged because the length of them has precluded their publication in full at the price they were offered. When Woolworth's did a sixpenny edition of Carnival a certain amount of i t was cut. My attitude was that I preferred to have my work read in abbreviated form than not read at all. I was able to assume that those new readers who had found that they enjoyed my work would take the trouble to enlarge their acquaintance with i t . My firm opinion is that these abridged operas are a boon to the great majority of gramophone owners. I consider that the publication by Columbia of these abridged Gilbert and Sullivan operas has brought pleasure to hundreds or homes all over the world, and I entirely fail to see what harm has been done to anybody. Those who "regard with horror," such is the expression used by one of my corres.pondents, the publication of abridged operas, and who regard my advocacy of them as a sign that I am approaching senility, can always buy the full version if they want to spend the money. I do not know of any opera that only exists in an abridged form except some of ·Wagner's, and I never heard anybody cry out "that the Philistines were at our gates when His Master's