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The GRAMOPHONE

April 1937

album of the London String Quartet performance and put that on. This was a very early electric recording, however, and so unpleasantly metallic that I took i t off, exclaiming: "It's about t ime another recording of this quartet was made." As I spoke those words the door opened and in came the Columbia album of the Roth Quartet performance on five 12-inch discs, which I was so glad to get that any criticism of the interpretation was temporarily allayed. Now that I have recovered from the pleasure of a wish granted so immediately I shall have to be ungenerous enough to insist that the Roth Quartet playing of the first two movements is not so romantic as I should like i t to be. Their performance of the third and fourth movements is admirable, but I have never greatly cared for these two movements, which do not seem to me to live up to the lyrical beauty of the first movement and the solemn radiance of the second. I must try to persuade the B.B.C., which, in spite of what its critics say, I have always found willing to entertain suggestions, to let me compere a programme of some of my favourite movements from chamber music without allowing listeners to know in advance that they are going to hear a note of chamber music. One of the movements I should certainly choose would be the first from the Death and the Maiden quartet. I can imagine the pleasure I should get from telling listeners that what they had been listening to was not their favourite song from Lilac Time but the allegro from Schubert's Quartet No. 14 in D minor.

This prejudice against chamber music is fostered by the superstition that chamber music is an esoteric affair to the mysteries of which only a long and arduous initiation can lead. A ridiculous superstition. Chamber music in its prime was music written to entertain a household. It was intended to be played by the members of a family, or a gathering of friends, and that i t was so played is evident from the fact that i t was worth while printing so much of it. A performance of chamber music was at one time the equivalent of turning on the wireless and listening to one or other of the world's fantastic sweethearts presenting a programme of l ight music. At one time to say, "I am very fond of music except, of course, chamber music and all that highbrow stuff the B.B.C. will give us," would have been considered the remark of a congenital idiot. To like music and dislike chamber music would not have been considered the taste of a rational being. Democracy is an ideal political condition and I find i t difficult to put myself into the mind of the man who refuses to accept such an ideal. Yet a belief in democracy should not indude a fatuous respect for popular taste, but a confident hope of raising that popular taste from its present vileness-and if I could find a stronger word I would use i t-to something better. Public taste at the moment considers the cinema organ a beautiful noise. Those who believe the cinema organ to be a pestilent disseminator of cheap ugliness are reproached for their intellectual snobbery and lack of human sympathy. Now, i f I thought that the cinema organ provided a stepping-stone to lead men and women out of the morass, not of bad taste so much as of utter tastelessness, in which they are wallowing in self-complacent content, I would never say a word against the cinema organ. Unfortunately, the cinema organ merely provides a concrete bathing-pool of tepid, turbid water in which the public wallows more complacently than ever. We who oppose any surrender to popular taste are always accused of wanting to establish a select little corner in which we can enjoy ourselves without intrusion from the vulgar herd. No accusation could be more unjust. We ask for good music to be given to the public because we desire that the public should be given every opportunity to devel-op its taste. I am not for ever harping on the enjoyment of chamber music on the gramophone in any cock-a-hoop spirit of glorious isolation, but because I know that there are still dozens of readers of this paper who will not have enough patience and humility to give chamber music a chance. Nobody can accuse me of ~ny lack of catholicity of taste in l i terature or music, and the fact that I can enjoy a~ much as I do good popular stuff like the Blue Danube should be a guarantee to those who enjoy i t as much as I do myself that they can enjoy equally all the chamber music I can enjoy.

I am wining to wager that the first time I heard Beethoven's Quartet in E flat major, Op. 127, I had as little appreciation of i t as any reader of this paper who professes to either a dislike of or a complete indifference to chamber music. During the last few years I have had many opportunities of listening to this great work as interpreted by the Lener Quartet in a Columbia album and by the Flonzaley Quartet in an H.M.V. album. It was those oft-repeated previous playings which enabled me to declare as soon as I heard the latest performance by the Busch Quartet on five H.M.V. discs that this, whether from the point of view of interpretation, of instrumental virtuosity, or of recording, was the finest album of chamber music so far published. Having come to this conclusion, I was relieved to find the performance extolled by A. R. in last month's GRAMOPHONE, for I should have been badly shaken if he had damned i t with faint praise. Do let me insist for the nth t ime that my appreciation and understanding and knowledge ofchamber music are within reach of any reader of THE GRAMOPHONE who will approach chamber music in the way I approached it. When I first acquired a gramophone I acquired all the chamber music obtainable, and that amount did not fill three ordinary storage albums. Every record was played so often that I absorbed the music as a plant absorbs sunlight. I could almost say that chamber music became a part of the air I was breathing. I have been told by superior