The Black Country. Drawings by Edward Wadsworth: The Leicester Galleries. (January.)
Mr. Wadsworth has almost found himself in his Black Country pictures, or better he has found a real object which coincides with his particular "vorticist" predilection. Continually is he obsessed with a certain forked-lightning pattern which zigzags over the world. Where it does not he often puts it there and, partially removing the world, leaves a pattern. However, in the slag heaps and belching chimneys and curved canals and splintered roofs of the Black Country, at any rate sometimes, this pattern comes back to earth, and the result is a striking picture. Vorticism and Futurism, in so far as they are art tendencies, represent the scientist and business man of the nineteenth century emerging painfully into emotional expression. Mr. Wadsworth and the "Futurists" have not been the first to discover science and industry artistically, but hitherto stress has been laid on the general impressiveness, the mystery and atmospheric volume of the subject. Mr. Wadsworth's particular contribution concerns the sheer joy in brutal mechanical movement and in the deadly bulk and solidity of industrial products and by-products. His best drawings are of ladle slag heaps, consisting of metallic-looking boulders hurled out into a desolation that yet teems with the energy that made and discarded them.
*****
We have to congratulate Mr. D. Y. Cameron and Mr. George Henry on their election as Associates of the Royal Academy.
HOWARD HANNAY
MUSIC
THE RESURRECTION OF AN OPERA
IT was Dr. Vaughan Williams who, sometime about 1912 or 1913, suggested Purcell's opera The Fairy Queen for performance at Cambridge. In 1911 Mr. Clive Carey and a few others had organised at Cambridge a performance of The Magic Flute. Mozart's last and greatest work for the stage was in those days not so familiar to English audiences as it is now. It had not been seen in this country, as far as I am aware, since it was given by the students of the Royal College of Music about twenty years ago. That it should be attempted by Cambridge amateurs was regarded as preposterous—even Covent Garden had shied at it. But the promoters of the Cambridge opera were less nervous. If they had confidence, it was a confidence in Mozart and in the opera rather than in themselves. They knew the opera intimately enough to have convinced themselves that the chief difficulty of The Magic Flute lay not in the extreme compass of the two parts of Sarastro and the Queen of Night, but first in the necessity for a clear and logical exposition of the story, secondly in the complication of the ensemble numbers, and thirdly perhaps in the psychology of what is really the most difficult part of all, the Orator (Der Sprecher). If singers could be found who were prepared to sing the parts of Gabriel and Raphael in The Creation, they could make at least a decent show of Sarastro and the Queen. Ensemble singing was merely a matter of musicianship and hard work; the personality of the Orator was of necessity a question largely of luck in finding the right man and coaching him intelligently. The producers of the Cambridge performance were guided by two principles, to aim at clearness and unity of style rather than at magnificence, and to pin their faith to a great dramatic composer rather than to a star cast.