THAT BENJAMIN BRITTEN already possessed in his early twenties a most astonishing technical assurance has never been in doubt; nor that he commanded a range of feeling and a stylistic integrity which proclaimed a uniquely precocious maturity. So much was evident from early published scores like the Sinfonietta, Phantasy for oboe quartet, Variations on a theme of Frank Bridge, and Our Hunting Fathers. The route by which he had reached this early maturity, however, was not generally known until comparatively recently, and the book which was for decades to remain the most reliable and perceptive guide to his music—the symposium of 1952 edited by Donald Mitchell and Hans Keller—said little about the pre-opus 1 works, or about influences.

NEARLY THIRTY YEARS AGO I wrote an article for this magazine introducing Andrzej Panufnik, as a worthwhile composer then new to me. Since then he has grown tremendously, in range and in stature. He is Polish, and that bulks large in his music, as it does in the work of any Polish composer; but he is more than that—he is a world artist, and it seems propitious now to examine some of the music that has proved this increase in stature.

THE TIME will almost certainly arrive when historians of the music of the present century will speak of the ‘Darmstadt School’ of composers—that group of musicians many of whose earlier works were first heard at the Summer School in that city. Indeed, the phrase has already gained some ground, even if it has not yet entered general parlance. When the term ‘Second Viennese School’ was invented, some years after the ‘school’ had in fact broken up for its vacation, there may have seemed to be some justification for giving it such a name, since it had at least consisted of a teacher and his pupils; only now, perhaps, are we able to see that the ‘classes’ were somewhat unruly ones, and neither the pupils nor their most un-academic teacher had managed to invent even the most elementary ‘syllabus’ or even ‘ethos’ for the establishment. If we dare to speak of a ‘Darmstadt School’, then we shall certainly search in vain for its more than temporary guiding spirit, or for an ethos which was universally accepted.

SHORTLY BEFORE HIS DEATH in 1958 Vaughan Williams told Michael Kennedy, who was already committed to writing the composer's ‘musical biography’, that the coda or Epilogue to the final movement of his A London Symphony had a link with the end of H.G. Wells's novel Tono-Bungay, in which London is evoked as the book's narrator and central character passes down the Thames through the city to the open sea. ‘For actual coda see end of Wells's Tono Bungay’ was the composer's laconic advice. Kennedy then quotes two short passages from the final chapter of Tono-Bungay, and these have since become a standard point of reference for other writers on the symphony. They have appeared in record sleeve and programme notes, and in other places, such as Hugh Ottaway's BBC Music Guide to the Vaughan Williams Symphonies. The most frequently quoted passage is the following:

Light after light goes down. England and the Kingdom, Britain and the Empire, the old prides and the old devotions, glide abeam, astern, sink down upon the horizon, pass—pass. The river passes—London passes, England passes…