THE B.B.C. ORCHESTRA
(Section E) .
Led by MARIE WILSON
Conducted by FRANK BRIDGE -
The original name of the opera which we usually call simply The Seraglio is The Abduction from the Seraglio. The story was adapted from a play of that day, modified by Mozart himself. It turns on the capture of a fair lady by a Turkish ' Bashaw ' and her rescue by her faithful lover, a young Spanish gentleman. The whole story is treated in the most lighthearted spirit, and Mozart's gay and tuneful music suits it admirably. It is recorded that when the opera was first performed, in the ! presence of the Emperor, he thought the scoring too full—it probably was considerably richer than any he was accustomed to-and that he said to Mozart : ' 'There are too many notes in the music.' If report be true, Mozart replied that there were just as many as there ought to be. The opera has been heard in this country both under Sir Thomas Beecham 's guidance, and afterwards from the B.N.O.C.
George Butterworth , one of the most promising of the young composers of the pre-war period, was killed in action in 1916 at the age of thirty-one. What work he did leave has an intrinsic value outside any consideration of sentiment, and this work, and ' The Banks of Green Willows ', also for orchestra, are in the permanent concert repertory. The subject of the Rhapsody, 'A Shropshire Lad ' refers, of course, to the volume of poems under that title, by A. E. Housman. No title could 'better have represented the years immediately preceding the war. Folk-song, ballad, and all they implied, had seized the imagination of practically all young English composers. Housman's poems, which are in effect' folk-ballads in a modern idiom, were cast like seed upon a soil already well prepared and fertilised.