(Led by F. Weist Hill)
Conductor, Adrian Boult
Dorothy Stanton (Soprano)

THOMAS ARNE, who was born in 1710, fifteen years after the death of Purcell, was the most considerable English musician up to the time of his death in ] 789. It has often been maintained that English music is better adapted to the lighter and more sophisticated forms than to the heavier and possibly more sincere forms of art, and it is in this very field of pastoral and naively sentimental simplicity that Arne shows his genius. He wrote a great deal for the theatre, including a largo number of operas and stage pieces. In his capacity as composer at Drury Lane Theatre as well as at Vauxhall Gardens he must have written much occasional and incidental music of all sorts.
The Overture in B Flat doubtless comes under this heading.

THIS music was composed for the wedding of Elisa Haffner, daughter of the Burgomaster of Salzburg. The Burgomaster seems to have been a thoroughly good fellow, and Mozart was doubtless pleased to do it. But the work has nothing particularly to do with a wedding. It is quiet, straightforward evening entertainment music-which is exactly what a serenade should be, for the word serenade means simply an evening song. Mozart wrote a number of serenades and divertimenti, all of them made up of a number of short movements. These were intended to be played as light music and as a background to recreation. There is no reason why these engaging little movements should not have been played in cafes and beer gardens ; they probably were.

GRETY lived in stirring times. He was writing operas under Louis XV, and continued under the next reign, during the Revolution, and lived to be made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour by Napoleon himself. All this time he was writing operas as hard as he could go, but out of fifty which were put on in Paris only three or four really survived, the most brilliant being a comic opera, one of the earliest he wrote, with a title which might be very topically translated as The Talking Picture. Gretry cut some figure in the various cultured circles of his day. His operas wore melodious and popular, and indeed works of marked genius. He was a witty talker and had a host of literary friends, but his chief fault was an excessive vanity, and he wrote not only his own memoirs, in which it is clear he thought himself a very fine fellow, but a number of writings on music which extolled the very fine works of this very fine fellow. There is no question, however, that Gretry was a great musician and had an immense influence. To this day students are never tired of studying the scores of his operas.
This Suite is an arrangement by the conductor, Felix Mottl, of certain dances selected hero and there from his many operas.

THE Two Friends from Salamanca is a two-act Singspiel or ballad opera, and was one of five stage works composed by Schubert in a single year, together with a great quantity of other music in all forms. He never saw any of those things acted, nor seemed to bother about them once they were written, and one wonders what made him persist throughout his life in writing for the theatre. He may have been persuaded in this case by his eccentric friend Mayrhofer, a poet with whom Schubert at one time lodged. The libretto of the Two Friends was by Mayrhofer, who gave Schubert not only a further opera book to set, but fed him with not less than fifty-four of his poems, which Schubert made into some of his finest songs.