ON INTERPRETATION IN MUSIC

32November 27th, 1919.

I have spoken in this first paragraph of the unhappy state of the small collections in England because that state is an obvious and striking result of the same cause which has produced most of our mistakes in the preservation, sorting and editing of documents in the past; because the distinction at present existing between the public and the private collections is so symptomatic of our worst failure in this field: in effect, in all these years during which historical documents have met with a certain amount of appreciation, it has apparently never occurred to us to make definite search for the essential features common to all records, high or low, and to apply to all records atreatment based on the examination of those features. But the most interesting archive question of the present time seems to me to be the question of the records we ourselves are producing. If our shortcomings as owners of archives have affected adversely our treatment of what the past has left to us, are they not capable of doing quite as much harm to that which we ourselves are to bequeath to the future? And, further, if England, owing to its wealth of records, provides a particularly large number of examples of things to be avoided, is it not possible that the application of the warning derived from these may prove to be common to other countries? It is, indeed, no new criticism of the French School, the acknowledged leader of the world in this matter, to say that the circumstances under which the French national collections were put together have led it sometimes to consider the isolateddocumentrather to the exclusion of thatrecordwhich forms only a single link in a long chain.

We are led, therefore, to inquire how far certain generalisations, based on the character of our existing English records, maybe applied as criteria to the treatment of those records which are accumulating in our own time in England and perhaps in other countries.

A record, if we may venture here to give definition to a loosely-used word, is a document drawn up, or at any rate made use of, in the course of an administrative process, of which itself forms a part, and subsequently preserved in his own custody for his own reference by the administrator concerned or his successors. The process and the administration may be as important or unimportant as you please; the result may be the Rolls of Chancery or the deed-box of a manor: the essential features are the same in both cases—the administrative origin, the administrative reason for preservation, the preservation in administrative custody: so also are the results the same from the point of view of the subsequent 'ologist—the two priceless qualities of authenticity and impartiality; the first proceeding from the fact that the records have been always incustody,33and in a certain relationship one with another, the second derived from the fact that they were not drawn up for the information ofposterity,34and, therefore, have no bias to one side or the other of posterity's problems. Any number of interestinginstances35might be adduced from the records of the past, both of the value of these qualities and of the ease with which they may be flawed; but let us here leave for the time consideration of the records the past has bequeathed to us and inquire how far the qualities which, with all itshistorical faults, it gave us in most of its documents are going to be found by our descendants in those we leave to them. The unprecedented mass of documents which the various executive departments must have accumulated during the war may well frighten us into a serious consideration of this subject at the present moment.

33The licence of high officials has sometimes violated this, a practice much to be deprecated. I refer to this again below.

34This fact may, of course, lead in ignorant times, such as was the early nineteenth century, to destruction.

35A well-known case is the volume, belonging to the records of the Master of the Revels, which, if it is genuine, dates one of Shakespeare's plays: unfortunately it was for a considerable time out of official custody, and doubts have been cast on the authenticity of the most important page.

Now, the rules for safe preservation and custody are simple things, matters of proved experience, a number of which are set out in a small book recently published in England, and at more length in the well-known Continentaltreatise;36and though the standard of archive-keeping by local authorities is at present very uneven, we may, for the shortening of this article, dismiss that side of the question with pious hopes. Assuming, then, that the documents of our own time, when they come to the state of archives, will be preserved in suitable places and under proper rules of custody, assuming further that we are able to drill archivists into leaving their charges as far as possible in the physical order and state in which they find them (so as to preserve the old association of document with document), we have to face as our chief danger a threat not so much to the authenticity of the record as to its impartiality—the most important of all its qualities and one which, once damaged, cannot be restored. Interference with impartiality may occur at two points: in the first place it may occur, as indeed it has sometimes done in the past, at or near the time of the document's making; the administrator who makes it may himself have an eye on posterity. We shall have to recur to this again, but for the moment let us turn to the second, which is the more serious because it brings us up against the great modern record problem, bulk: impartiality may be—rather, is—impugned when we come to the selection of documents for preservation.

36C. Johnson:The Care of Documents(S.P.C.K. Helps for Students of History); and Muller, Feith, and Fruin:Manuel pour le Classement des Archives.

The obvious remedy for this is not to select—to preserve everything; but this is in practice an equally obvious impossibility: the instance already quoted of the accumulation of our warrecords37would no doubt supply apt illustration, but the custodian of county records is faced on his small scale with exactly the same difficulty: we are all confronted, in fact, with this main problem—how are we to reconcile our desire to preserve in our records certain qualities which have accompanied in the past an uncontrolled accumulation with the necessity of our own day for restriction? Up to now, in face of this problem, and in face of the system of selection, or destruction, which is actually in use, no one (not even the Royal Commission, which has obviously devoted much attention to the subject) has really gone further than to tell the selectors that they must be very careful. But can they? Let us take a case of public records, an imaginary class of, say, 200,000 pieces tobe dealt with in a limited space of time by a limited number of people who have probably other work waiting to be done: how can they possibly say (since they have not the time to make a detailed comparison) that all the information contained in certain documents which they propose to condemn is to be found elsewhere? Or, taking another criterion, how can they say that certain documents are going to be without interest for the future? There are classes of documents in the Public Record Office now frequently used and highly valued which little more than fifty years ago might well have been destroyed as having no interest for any branch of human study then known.

37Records so vast that in its last report (1919) the Royal Commission has found it necessary to alter its original (1914) recommendations regarding the provision of new repository accommodation.

At this point the natural thing is to seek the advice of the historian, who is indeed, being an enthusiast, anxious to give it. Now, the historian may fairly claim to have done much for records in the past. He is mainly responsible for the recognition of public records as things valuable and to be kept carefully for other reasons than that of mere antiquity; and he has done something in England (one always hopes that he will do more presently) for local and private collections. But he cannot predict the needs of future research workers (who may not be historians at all) any more than he was able to predict in the time of the old Record Commission the needs of our own day: witness the indexes, quite useless to an economic historian, of the very important Chancery Rolls of King John, published about 1830. Even if we grant that he may make a better guess than other men, we are met by a still graver objection in the fact that we cannot rule out at least the possibility (since he is human and an historian) of his having a predilection for the evidence which will establish a certain view or emphasise a certain line of inquiry. The use of an historian, or of any other person who uses records for research purposes, as a selector seems to me incompatible with the preservation of their characteristic impartiality: there will be a possibility—and the mere possibility is enough—ofsuppressio veri, if not ofsuggestio falsi; and what should have been a record, preserved by circumstances which do not affect its value as evidence, will become no more than the narrative or at most thepièce justificativeof a specialist; you might as well allow a botanist to produce a hybrid in order to prove not its possibility but its existence as a natural form.

But if we cannot use the historian for our purposes we may perhaps call in the trained archivist. I am afraid that here again we shall find no help. The archivist may take an interest in any of the subjects upon which his collections furnish evidence; but such interests have nothing to do with (indeed they sometimes impede) the duties that are his of safeguarding, arranging, and making accessible and of basing himself for all these duties on the internal structure of the classes of documents in his charge: with the possible exception of the last there is nothing in these qualifications to make him more fit than the historian for the work of selection—and destruction.

Is there, then, no possible way—we will not say of dealing with our present accumulations; they, it may be, on account of their sheer bulk mustbe dealt with by suchad hocmethods as the circumstances admit of; and into those methods it is not our province here to enter—but merely for our guidance in the future, is there no chance of reconciling the requirements of ourselves and posterity (so far as these can be foreseen) with the intrinsic interests of the records themselves—the external with the internal—or rather perhaps of finding some method of treatment which will give to our records a reasonable bulk while preserving their important characteristics, and at the same time will at least not sacrifice unduly the interests of the research-worker? Perhaps an indication of such a possibility is to be found in the words "our present accumulations" which we used above. How would it be if we set ourselves in the future to prevent accumulations?

A certain amount of contemporary destruction of the more obviously ephemeral papers—notes from one department of an office to another saying, "Passed to you, please," and perhaps documents of a more advanced type—does, of course, in our own days sometimes take place in large offices. And there are not wanting indications that a perception of the need of something more, especially in regard to public offices, has been growing since the Act of 1877, provided that the Master of the Rolls might make rules respecting the disposal by destruction or otherwise of documents which are deposited in or can be removed to the Public Record Office (note the lack of any distinction between the two classes) and which are not of sufficient public value to justify their preservation in the Public Record Office. Such an indication is seen in the desire expressed by the late Royal Commission on PublicRecords38for the substitution in Government offices of destruction and preservation of documents according to well-considered principles for destruction founded on arbitrary, varying opinions; and for the relief of the Public Record Office Repository from a cumbersome mass of useless or unnecessary documents. But no one, so far as I am aware, has yet summed up and balanced, for the benefit of all records and record-keepers, whether public or private, the merits and demerits of the various systems of destruction, either in the light of the intrinsic character of records themselves or in that of the experience gained from a study of our ancestors' methods. And the accumulations of documents, many of which are subsequently judged not to be material, continue.

38First report, p. 41; cp.: second report, p. 71, etc.

Now we may assume, indeed we know, that from the earliest times not only selections of subjects for representation in permanent records but also actual destruction of documents has been practised by the administrators who have left us their collections. Only—and here is the distinction—since the question of bulk did not trouble them as it does us, they were able to act solely on the ground that the record in question was not required for their current administrative purposes. Note that in this their impartiality was not affected by the external considerations of either this world or the next, neither by any interest in the history-writing of the future, nor by theexigencies of floor-space in the present. Any subsequent destruction, direct or indirect, by our ancestors was quite a different matter: such destruction has invariably been the subject ultimately of adverse criticism, though no doubt the person responsible saw no particular harm in it. For example, take the case of the burning of the Exchequer tallies in 1834. The position of contemporaries is probably represented tolerably by that of Charles Dickens, who criticised the proceeding on the ground not only that it burned down the Houses of Parliament, but also that it was a wanton waste of firewood which might have been given to the poor: yet already we, not a hundred years after, are regretting it. On the other hand, though historians are in the habit of saying vaguely that much which was of incalculable value must have been lost, they refer always to the losses due to various forms of carelessness. I have never heard anyone venture to criticise the Chancery, for example, because it did not preserve full copies of non-returnable writs or the Exchequer because certain draft accounts were destroyed.

What, in fact, are the principal gaps in old records which affect us moderns? If we take two of the documents which have thrown light on the personal history of Shakespeare (not a matter of much moment to his contemporaries) we shall arrive at a clear distinction between two different kinds of destruction, or shall we say failure to preserve? On the one hand, we have a document signed by Shakespeare as a witness: all that mattered to the court here was that certain evidence had been given by some indifferent person and accepted. Could we have blamed it if it had failed to preserve this signature which we find so intriguing, or had allowed it (as was sometimes done) to be written in by the scribe who took down the deposition? Or if it had preserved the whole document only in the form of a summary? Most certainly we could not: how was the court to know that we should be interested in Shakespeare's life and handwriting? On the other hand, take the case where Shakespeare himself was party to a fine: had the court of Common Pleas failed to preserve the "foot" of that fine, which was a recognised form of evidence of its own transactions, we should legitimately criticise its carelessness.

It appears, therefore, that the only criticism posterity will be able to pass on us, if we adhere to the practice of our ancestors, will be one based on the extent to which we leave record behind us of the work of the various administrations; and our further queries then resolve themselves into two:

(1) Can we train our administrator so to keep his recordsat the time they are madethat they will give a fair picture of the activities of his office, and this without desiring him to do it for the benefit of posterity, without making an historian of him?

(2) Can this be done so economically as to get rid of the bulk difficulty in connection with preservation?

If the answer to each of these questions is "Yes," then our problem is solved.

It is not, of course, possible to answer them in detail here, because to do so would involve inserting a detailed scheme for the keeping of archives in amodern office; it would also involve going into such highly technical, and in some cases controversial, matters as the use and abuse of flimsies, the whole position of the typewriter in record-making (with an excursus on carbons and inks), the comparative merits of various filing systems, and, as regards this country at least, liaison between Government departments. But we may perhaps try in the most general terms to lay down a few first principles and see how far they indicate the possibility of an answer. We may premise that while no two accountants differ radically in their methods, the name of the various filing systems and practices is legion; while we have had double-entry for three or four hundred years, no one has yet hit on a system of filing correspondence and the like which commands general approval; from which we may draw the corollary that almost everywhere there are large redundancies.

If, then, we are to educate our administrator we should begin

(1) By explaining the trouble that has been caused by accumulations of records in the past and the impossibility of dealing with them reliably and satisfactorily in the present. This trouble we require him to prevent in the future by a system of personal attention and studied economy. (He would, of course, say at once that this could not be done; the reply is "Have you tried?")

(2) The next point is concerned also with authenticity, but it is in every way of primaryimportance.39

39How important may be judged from the perusal of more than one modern volume of more than one great statesman's "Private Papers"—many of them public records which have been taken out of custody. Perhaps the new diplomacy may do something to remedy this evil.

Every office, no matter how small, must have aregistry;40i.e., must be divided up,quarecords, into two branches, administrative and executive; it must have a small branch which keeps and controls, distinct from the large which makes and uses, documents. Registry, the keeper and controller of office papers, is to lay down the way in which letters are to be written and whether copies are to be made. When they are made (or received, if they come from without) all office documents are the property of registry, which is responsible for destruction or preservation (with, of course, the advantage of advice from the executive side in a large office) and for safeguarding and methods of arrangement.

40I hope I shall not be accused of ignorance of the fact that registries do exist in some offices. The point is, first, that their existence is not universal; second, that they have not yet been turned towards those functions which it is here suggested they should fulfil.

(3) The golden rule for administrators is: in preserving and arranging documents keep in view a single purpose, that of enabling an ignorant successor by their means to carry on if you and the whole of your staff were blotted out. We depend largely on this rule for an answer to the historian's objection that the administrator if left to himself will destroy all the valuable things—lose the Shakespeare fine, in fact. It is not, however, inserted here for that purpose, but because it is obviously sound.

(4) Apart from this rule the first principle should be economy; and economy, if registry is not to be overburdened with work, must consist largely in rules carefully thought out concerning not the documents which are to be destroyed, but the documents which are never to be made: for example, probably at least 50 per cent. of the copies of out-letters which are preserved in a big office record nothing more than despatch, which could be done in two words or less in a general register.

(5) The ideal subject index, it has been said, would have only one entry and any quantity of cross-references; similarly there is an ideal of a single master series in records: being an ideal, neither of these things is realisable, but it is possible to get near to them. For example, registry can and should have a record of its own, a single general register, and a properly made entry in this would be amply sufficient record of many transactions which are at present dignified with adossier.

(6) In this connection we may refer to the necessity for the intelligent use of mechanical devices: many duplicates and unnecessary documents are habitually kept owing to a failure to appreciate the merits as distinguishing features of a red pencil and a blue, the opposition of left to right, the possibilities of the first and the second column, not to mention the third, fourth, and fifth....

(7) Registry should have a clear conception of the nature of records—that there are only three kinds: In-letters, out-letters, and memoranda (including accounts). A realisation of this and of the way in which records work into each other means economy in internal arrangement, and in the case of Government offices might, if liaison were close and a single system of record-keeping in general use, make new economies possible as between departments.

(8) So far we have been considering the possibilities of an economy which consists in not making documents; but we have, of course, to consider also actual destruction, of which there are three kinds: (a) First, there is what we may callposthumous destruction, the kind which is now most in vogue, and which we want to stop altogether: that is the destruction which deals with an accumulation formed perhaps years before—destruction for its own sake, because of over-great bulk. Then (b) there isimmediate destruction, which gives effect to the judgment passed at the earliest possible moment on a document: you wait only until a letter (let us say perhaps a letter making an appointment) is acknowledged, and then, since its actual terms concern only the person addressed, and for your office's purposes you have sufficient evidence in your registry, you destroy. (c) Finally, there isdeferred destruction, the kind which comes into operation where a document, already condemned, so far as concerns the purposes of the office, is temporarily preserved for some purely external reason; for example, in connection with the provisions of the Statute of Limitations.

(9) A primary rule of destruction is that no letter-in, copy of letter-out, or draft of office memoranda shall be kept which does not mean a stage inadvance for the office's business. But it is particularly necessary that this destruction should take place at the earliest possible moment, while the business is fresh in the minds of those concerned; because there are documents which, though they have no direct result themselves, yet by that very fact mark an advance in the policy (let us say) of a department, and delay in the consideration of these might conceivably be dangerous.

(10) For the purposes ofdeferred destructionsome system of automatic working will be necessary; for instance, if large masses of papers, valueless otherwise to the office, have to be kept, say, for six years for legal reasons, there should be a regular system by which every day the register of six years back should be examined and the papers there marked (let us say) D.D., for deferred destruction, should be at once drawn, disposed of, and marked off. It is possible that some system might be introduced to cover doubtful cases, which could be given a short lease of life—some statutory number of months, pending a decision by circumstances upon their value. This would be a good safeguard against careless destruction, though that should never occur.

(11) Finally, lest this compromise should let in abuses, there must be a short time of probation for documents fixed, perhaps not more than a year; and, as soon as any document has passed through that, it should automatically go to the record class, where no further destruction is permitted; it would probably in practice be subjected to a final scrutiny a few days before it reached this happy state. As many such documents might still be needed for reference, they would possibly remain with those still on probation or go only to some intermediate muniment-room, not to the final record repository, but they would be records, full-fledged.

The above suggestions are offered only as suggestions, susceptible of much revision and needing much more expansion. The only claim made for them is that they do face the real difficulty of the record situation, and do sketch lines along which the reasonable requirements of the historian, or any other worker who may be destined in the future to pursue strange learning along unthought-of paths, are adequately met; the question of bulk is met, and the present system of dealing in a hopeless kind of way with accumulations already formed and hardened is got rid of; and violence is not done to the structure of the records themselves.

Criticism of the proposed system will probably be divided between statements that it does too much and that it does too little. We may reply that there is no inherent impossibility in thevia media, that all alternative systems are destructive of the most essential qualities of records, and that ours is, therefore, at least worth a trial.

Attempts are from time to time made in most large offices to secure the keeping of documents in a manner convenient to those who use them for official purposes. But why not something longer sighted, a little care for the records themselves? Why not aManual of Record Making and Keeping for Clerks in Government and other Offices?

By SIR GEORGE HENSCHEL, Mus.Doc.

THEquestion of interpretation, especially in the field of music, and more particularly as regards song, has been prominent of late. Lectures on interpretation, books on the subject have been announced in the papers under more or less attractive titles, but I fear I have never read the latter, nor gone to any of the former. Indeed I confess that throughout my life I have given little, if any, thought to interpretation: a fact not easily accounted for, unless it be that when I was young, people must have been more unsophisticated. Interpretation in music was a thing rarely spoken of. If, for instance, there was a Beethoven symphony on the programme of a concert, people went because they wanted to hear the symphony, not how a conductor interpreted it. It evidently sufficed these good people to have confidence in the musicianship and skill of the members of an orchestra and in the loyalty of their conductor as regards carrying out the composer's wishes as totempoand expression, confidence altogether in the efficiency of any artist ready to brave the test of publicity. Moreover, conductors were then stationary; the fashion of prima-donna conductors, travelling from one place to another, each trying to outdo his rival in so-called originality, had not come into being, and there was little opportunity for a comparison.

Of course, I had read or heard of points in law being capable of different interpretation by different lawyers, also was aware of the fact that interpreters are persons who, being masters of several languages, act between two people ignorant of each other's tongue, or whose office it is to translate orally in their presence the words of parties speaking different languages, but I never connected the term with music, which, I thought, being a language spoken and understood all the world over, did not require the services of an interpreter. This, of course, was a very youthful notion. But even in later years the question did not interest me very much, and it was not until three or four years ago the editor of an American musical magazine asked me to write for his paper an article which he wished to be entitled "Some Elementary Truths on Song-Interpretation" that the matter attracted my serious attention. I remember answering the gentleman: "My dear sir,—Since we are still waiting for a satisfactory answer to the ancient question 'What is truth?' I must confess myself utterly incompetent to gratify your flattering desire; indeed, without immodesty, I hope, should be reluctant to accept any mortal's opinion regarding a question of art as truth." Somehow or other, however, the thing got hold of me and I began to be curious to see what could be said, or at any rate what I might be able to say on the subject. So, first of all, I consulted the Oxford Dictionary to see whether among the various definitionsof the word "Interpretation," which that wonderfully complete book was sure to offer, there might not be one applicable to music, or altogether to art. And there I found that "To interpret" may mean:

Expound the meaning of, bring out, make out the meaning of, explain, understand, render by artistic representation or performance.

Well, this was something to start from, anyhow. Let us see: "Expound the meaning of."

From the oracles of old, not infrequently more obscure on purpose to give them greater importance, down to a speech from the front benches, utterances inwordsmay, and indeed often do, need expounding the meaning of, but it seems to me in music, and, perhaps, in art altogether, the necessity for explanation nearly always indicates a certain degree of inferiority. I cannot imagine anyone looking at a Velasquez, or Titian, or Rembrandt, or Michelangelo asking "Whatdoesit mean?" but I am sure we all have heard that question, very likely emphasised by the addition of two little words, like "on earth," or something stronger, at exhibitions of Futurist art.

So in a piece of absolute music,i.e., music without words, for an orchestra or a solo instrument, any attempt at expounding the meaning of, make out the meaning of, must, in my humble opinion, always be more or less of a failure, whilst, of course, there can be no need of such an attempt at all if the music be programme music, or if, by the title given to it, like, for instance, Elegy, Reverie, Humoreske, Nocturne, Barcarolle, and so on, the composer clearly has indicated his intention. There is no need asking what Bach, Beethoven, Brahms meant by their symphonies, their fugues.

You might as well ask what the meaning of a cathedral. These things are there for us to wonder at the greatness and power of the human mind, to lose ourselves in admiration of the various forms of beauty in which they reveal themselves, to bow down, to worship. On the other hand, in music with words, the poems chosen by the composer are rarely sufficiently obscure or eccentric to require "expounding the meaning of."

It seems to me, therefore, that the only definition of the word interpretation with which we need concern ourselves is "Render by artistic representation or performance." And that would seem simple enough were it not that when it comes to a song we have to deal with a compound of poetry and music which complicates matters inasmuch as there is art required for reciting a poem as well as for singing the music.

That the music of a song, as such, may be beautifully rendered by an instrument other than the voice we all know. Who—to quote only one example—has not heard Schubert'sAve Mariaplayed on a 'cello? And the words of a song detached from the music may find an ideal interpreter in the person of a talented reciter, who, as regards music, may not know one note from another. The perfect interpreter of a song, therefore, would have to combine in him or herself the talents and qualities of both a reciter and a singer, and it will be seen at once that, as in song the music is of thefirst importance, not only should an intending singer make a point of studying music as well as singing, but the study of theory, harmony, counterpoint, etc., that is to say, of music as acreativeart should always be made the foundation on which all special studies for expressing that art should rest.

I have just said that in a song the music is first in importance. Should, therefore, by any chance a composer have failed, as some of the best have been known to now and then, to make the music fit the words completely, it would be the duty of the singer to consider themusicalphrase in the first instance and fit in the words as well as possible under the circumstances, even at the risk of breaking between two words which otherwise it would be better not to separate.

The question of breathing is altogether one which puzzles a great many singers. Take, for instance, a Bach or Handel aria, with semiquaver runs, often extending over half-a-dozen bars or more. There are singers who deem it beneath their dignity to breathe during such a run, and go on until they are red in the face, or else, if they see they must after all, put in additional words. This is quite unnecessary. Such occasions should be treated instrumentally. Give such a run to, say, an oboe player and you will find that he now and then will take an instantaneous little breath which enables him to do justice to every note and carry the thing through successfully and without exhaustion. It is generally the childish fear of being thought lacking in physical strength which induces some singers to delay breathing until the thought of their bursting a blood vessel remains the only one left in the poor listener, rendering anything like interpretation and, therefore, artistic enjoyment of such a performance utterly impossible. If you knowhowto breathe,i.e., how to replenish your lungs in the twinkling of an eye and imperceptibly, you cannot really breathe too often, for by such judicious breathing you are infinitely better able to satisfactorily accomplish the task before you. I remember being asked, years ago, to hear, with a view to giving my opinion on her talent and voice, a young singer, now quite famous, and being horrified at her utterly mistaken idea as to breathing. Disregarding all thought of intelligent phrasing, she actually never breathed unless positively obliged to do so. I stood it as long as I could and then got really angry. I stopped her short and said, "My dear young lady, do you wish to show the people what wonderful lungs you have, or what a beautiful song it is you are singing?" You can only do one of the two things at a time. Supposing even your breathing be good, which, being neither inaudible nor invisible, I am sorry to say it is not; you will have to learn that an accomplishment, be it ever so great, in anything pertaining to a detail in the meretechniqueof an art becomes a fault the moment attention is drawn to it. A singer who after the singing of a beautiful song is complimented on the excellent management of his breath or the wonderful articulation of his words should go home and resolve to do better next time, and not rest satisfied until he feels that the singer's highest aim should be the full appreciation and enjoyment on the part ofthe listener of the work interpreted. That aim being achieved he need wish for no greater praise.

For an intelligent and thoroughly satisfactory rendering of a song it is absolutely imperative that the vocal technique of the singer—and the breathing is as important a part of it as the actual singing—be developed to a state of efficiency, such as to need no more thought than, for instance, a pianist interpreting a Beethoven sonata should have to give to the fingering. All technical difficulties should have been overcome once for all and technique itself become a matter of course before an attempt at interpretation is made.

The two principal factors in the technique of singing are vocalisation and articulation, the one referring to music, the other—articulation—to speech, each complementing the other, though I hold that of the two articulation is the more important, since it is not the vowels but the consonants which enable a singer to "bring out the meaning of,"i.e., to interpret a word. You may sing the vowel, for instance, of the word "soul" ever so beautifully, it is not until you add the "l" with the same intensity of purpose that the word puts on flesh and blood, as it were, and becomes a living thing. Or take the word "remember." No actor, impersonating, for instance, the ghost of Hamlet's father, could make an impression with the word by dwelling on the vowel "Reme-e-e——," but leaving the vowel quickly and continuing to sound the "m" a good actor could walk almost across the whole stage holding on to that consonant without exaggeration—"Remem-m-m-ber." It is the consonants, as I said before, which convey the meaning of a word, and they should be made the subject of special study. If you wish to interpret you should, in the first place, strive to make yourself understood, and that, with the best vocalisation in the world, you can do only by a mastery of the consonants,i.e., by a perfect articulation. You all know that delicious story of the dear old lady coming home from a village concert, where the hit of the evening had been made by a girl singing, "Wae's me for Prince Charlie." Being asked whether she had enjoyed the concert, she said, "Not very much; I couldn't understand half the people who sang, except one girl who sang a nice funny song." "Do you remember the title?" "No, but she kept on asking 'Where's me fourpence, Charlie?'" This singer evidently hadnotmade a special study of consonants.

In vocalisation, too, there are certain details which often fail to receive, on the part of the singer, the attention which should be paid to them. One of them, and, in my opinion, a very important one, because of its great help towards interpretation, is thecolouringof the tone. I have heard many an otherwise good singer whose singing became exceedingly monotonous after a while by reason of a lack of variety in tone-colour, and I remember one lady in particular, the possessor of a beautiful rich contralto voice, from whose singing—had it not been for the words—you could not possibly have told whether what she sang was sad or cheerful. And yet our five vowels A, E, I, O, U being what we may call the primary colours of the voice, a singer should beable, by skilful and judicious mixing of these colours, to produce as many different shades of, let us say, the vowel A as a painter of the colour, say, of red. I have in my long experience of a teacher found it of the utmost value to make a pupil sing even a whole song on nothing but the vowels of the words, with the object of expressing the character of the music by mere vocalisation. We all love that glorious aria in theMessiah, "He was despised." Well, let a student try to convey its sadness, its deeply religious feeling in that way,i.e., without words, by the instrument of the voice alone, and, if after a while she succeeds, she will have taken a very big step toward realising,i.e., toward interpreting, the full beauty of that exquisite blending of words and music. For a thoroughly artistic rendering of emotional songs of that kind or of songs of dramatic character, such as ballads in which the singer has to impersonate character and run up and down the gamut of passion, it is of the greatest importance that the singer should have under perfect control not only his technique, but his feelings too. If your feelings get the better of you before the public, you are apt temporarily, and for physical reasons, to lose the mastery of your technique. There is a story told of the famous American actor, Edwin Booth, whose daughter, his severest critic, always, at his request, had to be in the stage-box where and whenever he acted. On one occasion the play was Victor Hugo'sThe King's Jester, known to us all from Verdi'sRigoletto. The part of the Jester was considered one of the best of Booth's many fine impersonations. When the harrowing scene came in which the poor man finds the body of his murdered daughter in the sack, Booth on that night for some reason or other was so overcome by the situation that actual tears ran down his cheeks, and he thought he had never acted that scene better or with greater feeling. The first thing his daughter said to him as they met in his dressing-room after the play was, "Were you quite well, father?" "Quite. Why?" "Because that scene with Gilda's body never made so little impression on me and on the people, as far as I could see."

And naturally. When you lose control of yourself you must not expect to be able to control your audience.

On the other hand, there was a great singer, Wilhelmina Schroeder-Devrient, the greatest exponent of the part of Leonora in Beethoven'sFidelio. In that wonderful scene in the underground prison when, disguised as the jailor's boy, and unrecognised by her unfortunate husband, the chained prisoner Florestan, she hands the starving man a crust of bread, singing to Beethoven's touchingly appealing notes, and in a voice choked with emotion, "There, take this bread, thou poor, poor man," that great singer was often known to actually crack a little aside joke with old Rocco, the jailor, whilst the front of the house was in tears. That is what I call art. Very likely she had cried herself many a time over that same scene when studying it.

Of course the actor—and by that I mean the operatic-singer as well—has a not inconsiderable advantage over the concert-singer, in that he possesses in facial expression and gesture two additional aids to interpretation, bothimportant and powerful. I say two, although facial expression is available to the concert-singer as well, but whilst that and gesture form an essential part in the training of the actor, facial expression is hardly ever systematically studied by the singer of songs who, in this respect, is left to his own resources with often rather curious results. I have listened to many a singer—I am sorry to say mostly of the fair sex—who, very likely for fear of making grimaces, maintained throughout a whole song, and heedless of the varying moods and sentiments expressed in it, a sickly, inane, apologetic sort of a smile, whilst, on the other hand, I remember hearing a famous singer who, in Schubert's great song,Der Doppelgänger, allowed his features already during the short prelude to the song to assume a most ghastly expression of pain and terror which, quite apart from such a proceeding being apt to have the opposite effect, was in this case quite the wrong thing to do, for the opening of the song is merely a sad recollection, on the part of the unfortunate lover, of happier times when his beloved was still inhabiting the house he is passing. "The night is still, the streets are silent, 'twas in this house my true love lived." The tragedy and horror only commence with "There too stands a man and gazes up on high, and wrings his hands in agony of pain," reaching the climax with the words, "I shudder when I behold his face, the moon reveals to me my own image." But when this climax came it was robbed of much of its impressiveness by the singer having anticipated it. He evidently took it for granted that his listeners knew Heine's poem and Schubert's song, or had made themselves acquainted with the words beforehand by looking into the book of words. That is a great mistake. You should always sing as if the song you are interpreting had never been known or sung before, and you were the first to make it public. Every one of you, I am sure, has at one time or other told a little fairy-story to a child. You know how deliberately such a story should be told, how distinctly the pronunciation of every syllable, every consonant, in order that the little ones may grasp the meaning of what you are saying the very moment you are saying it, so as not to lose the thread of the tale, to break the spell. Well, that's the way you should sing. Even if youknowthat what you are singing is the most well-known, popular, hackneyed thing, always imagine one person in your audience—sitting in the very last row—to whom it is something absolutely new, and that imaginary person should be the child to whom you are telling a story. So you see all these little details have to be thought out. The singer should even be careful in the selection of his songs. (When I speak of "him" and "his" I, of course, mean "her" and "hers" as well.) The greater the singer's art the more will he be able to force his hearers into forgetfulness of a possible discrepancy between, for instance, his personal appearance and the sentiment or character he is endeavouring to represent. But here, too, some discretion should be exercised. A lady, for instance, weighing fourteen stone and a half should not, as I have heard one do, put the audience's capacity for self-control to too severe a test by singing baby-songs like, "Put me in my little bed, mother," or "If nobody ever marries me and I don't know why he should." Yes, eventhe time of day, and the scene and the occasion should find a place among the questions to be considered by a singer when choosing a song for performance, as under circumstances the best interpretation may not only fail to be appreciated, but even produce an effect utterly unlooked for.

It was many years ago, two or three nights after Gilbert and Sullivan's incomparableMikadohad been launched on its triumphal career at the Savoy, that there was a big evening party at Sullivan's flat, to have the honour of meeting the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Edinburgh. An excellent little programme of music had been gone through, and just after midnight, supper being over, the whole party once more repaired to the drawing-room for some jollier things. Nearly all the principal singers from the Savoy had come over in theirMikadocostumes and, with the composer at the piano, delighted the guests with excerpts like "Three little Maids from School" and "The flowers that bloom in the Spring, tra-la," doubly fascinating then on account of the novelty of the thing.

Everybody, and none the least so the two Royal guests, who occupied two armchairs in front, with the programme in their hands, enjoyed the entertainment to the utmost, and the fun was at its height when one of the guests, a celebrated contralto, famous for her rendering of ballads—I mean the style of ballads in vogue thirty-five years ago—was asked if she wouldn't sing one of them. She, of course, readily consented, solemnly mounted the little platform, and there was a hush as she stood there, motionless like a statue, her face expressing a seriousness so strangely in contrast with the mirth and laughter that had pervaded the room but a few minutes before, that I noticed the two Royal programmes being brought somewhat nearer the Royal faces. Then the accompanist struck the first chords of the introduction and—could we really believe our ears?—the lady began to sing—you'll never guess—"The Three Fishers!" Higher and higher up went the Royal programmes, a dead silence reigned in the room until it came to the "Three Corpses," when, little by little, small noises like half-suppressed sneezes or sobs could be heard here and there, increasing in frequency and volume, and when it came to the refrain—it was now a little after 1 a.m.—"The sooner it's over the sooner to sleep," the last "moa-oa-oa-ning" was drowned in a vociferous applause of a character such as I am sure that ballad had never before evoked.

And now I should like to mention another factor in the rendering of music, the importance of which is often underrated, and that is thetempo. Good music, I have found, not only does not lose but rather gains by thetempo, whatever it might be, being taken with deliberation. There are degrees in any designation of time, and one is apt to forget that the Italian words in common for that purpose may refer, not only to the metronomic measure, but also to the character, the mood of a piece. Allegro means lively. But there are degrees of liveliness. An elephant may be lively, but I take his liveliness to be of a somewhat different kind from that, for instance, of the frisky little chap whose antics are so deliciously and humorously described in Goethe and Berlioz's immortal "Song of the Flea" inFaust. I rememberonce hearing Schubert'sErlkingtaken at such a break-neck speed that I wondered both father and child were not killed before the end of the first stanza. It reminded me of a rather amusing series of telegraphic versions of celebrated poems, which many years ago appeared in theFliegende Blätter—the ContinentalPunch—and of which that of theErlkingmight be rendered in English by something like this: "Night wild—Father and child—Ride through the dark—Erlking out for a lark—Boy frightened—Father's grip tightened—Father, ride on—Yes, my son—Reach home in fear and dread—Father alive, child dead."

When we recall the definition of the word Interpretation as it refers to music and poetry, viz., Rendering by artistic representation or performance, we shall find that that little qualification "artistic" makes all the difference in the world, inasmuch as it clearly shows that a mere representation or performance may not necessarily be an interpretation and that it requires an artist to make it such. And it follows that there must be any amount of variety in the interpretation of one and the same thing. An old Latin proverb says: "Duo si faciunt idem, non est idem." When two people do the same thing, it isn't the same thing. Well, if that be true in any undertaking, how infinitely great must be the possibility of such variety when the two people of the proverb are artists! For though we speak of the artistic temperament as if it were something absolute and definable, we know in how many different ways such a temperament may manifest itself.

There are no two painters who, put before the same landscape, would paint it,i.e., interpret it, in the same way. Neither, I maintain, are there two actors who would interpret Hamlet, or two singers who would sing the same song exactly alike. They each have, when they have attained maturity, their own style, and style, as an eminent painter of the last century has admirably expressed it, is the leaving out of everything superfluous, a definition which fits our subject equally well. No two artists will think the same thing superfluous; indeed, what the one considers so, the other may deem essential. Here, too, the actor—to come back to poetry and music—is better off than the musician. He has a far greater scope,i.e., a far wider outlet for his imagination. He is given the words to do what he likes with. One actor—to keep to Hamlet—might after long study have come to the conclusion that, for instance, the last lines of that fine monologue at the end of the second act should be triumphantly exclaimed in a loud voice:

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