A PROGRAMME OF OLD AND NEW FAVOURITES
VARLAAM, in the Opera Boris Godounov , is a wandering, dissolute monk. In this eong he tells of the glorious days ' Long agoafc Kasan, where I was fighting,' when Tsar Ivan liarried the Tartars in that city, drove mines beneath it, and blew up forty thousand of the hated enemy-so Varlaam says. mHE words of The Erl King are by Goethe. They picture a father on horseback: hasten'ing home with his sick child. The ghostly Erl
King flies with them, unseen and unheard by the. father, but both seen and heard by the boy."
The music most graphically pictures the hard' riding through the night (verse 1), the boy's terror at seeing the ghostly figure (verse 2); the. Erl King's wheedling invitation (verse 3), the boy's renewed terror and the father's attempt to
. comfort him (verse 4), the Erl King's second invitation (verse 5), the boy's last outcry and the father's consolation (verse 6). the Erl King's grasp of the boy (verse 7), and the boy's death
(verse 8).
BANTOCK'S song refers to the goddess of the Nile, Isis (the chief object of ancient
. Egyptian worship), who, bereft of her lord,
Osiris, lamentcd him ever after. It was said that her tears, dropped in season, were the cause of the yearly flooding of the Nile and of all the benefits that flowed from it.
Bantock has always been drawn to Eastern subjects for his music. The words of the set of Songs of Egypt, of which this is one, are by his wife.
ROSAMUNDE was so bad a play that it only ran for two nights, in 1823. The music was applauded, but naturally fell into the background when the play died, or, rather, was publicly executed.
,. Forty years later, George Grove , a great Schubert enthusiast, with his friend, young
Arthur Sullivan , rooted out from a dusty cupboard in Vienna the orchestra] parts of the music we are to hear. There the copies had lain, and in the end they would probably have gone into the fire had it not been for the lucky detective work of the two Englishmen.