THE WIRELESS MILITARY BAND
Conducted by B. WALTON O'DONNELL
T IKE more than one other composer who 'won an enduring name for himself, Donizetti was destined first for a legal career. For several years, too, he was a soldier, so that in The Daughter of the Regiment, for which he made the Italian version himself, he had a subject with one side of which he was familiar. It was while lie was still serving in the Army that his first four operas were successfully produced, the fourth of them-long ago forgotten-winning him not only great personal triumph, but release from further Army service.
Endowed with a wonderful facility for melodic invention and possessed of unusual energy, Donizetti produced, one after another, a series of operas which achieved real success at Rome, at Naples, and elsewhere. Not until 1830, however, in his thirty-third year, did his fame spread beyond the borders of his native land. It was the opera Anna Bolena , produced in that year, which laid the foundation of his world-wide fame ; it was in it that Lablache, as Henry the Eighth, scored one of his most brilliant successes here in London.
It is sad to have to record that, in his last years, the composer of so much bright and sparkling music, bubbling over with mirth and brave good spirits as it often is, became a prey to melancholy. In 1845, in his forty-eighth year, he had a stroke of paralysis from which he never recovered, dying three years later.
THE drama by the Norwegian poet, Bjornson,
Sigurd Jorsalfar , is a tale of Norway in the time of the Crusades. Sigurd and his brother Eystein, sons of the great Harald, are fierce rivals, each reigning over part of Norway. At the end of the play they become reconciled and dedicate themselves jointly to the service of their country.
Grieg wrote incidental music for the production of the play, afterwards recasting several of the movements in the form of a very effective Suite, second in popularity only to the two Suites from his music to Ibsen's Peer Gynt. The names of the three movements in this selection make it clear to what parts of the story they belong, and are vividly picturesque in the way we expect from Grieg.