When I was honoured by an invitation from your secretary to read a paper to the Musical Association about Lortzing I was genuinely surprised, because I did not feel that I was anything like an authority on him. I tried to explain this in my reply to Mr. Erlebach's invitation, but without success. Nevertheless, my only justification in standing before you to-day must be that I have had the invaluable opportunity of conducting and of watching Herr Hans Strohbach, of Cologne, produce one of Lortzing's operas. I refer to the Oxford University Opera Club's performances of “Zar und Zimmermann” last year. This first-hand experience should help me to speak more convincingly about my subject, at any rate from the practical standpoint.

My first duty is to thank the Musical Association for having elected me an Honorary Member and for having given me the opportunity to speak to you this afternoon. I must beg your forgiveness if I do not speak your language as well as I should wish. Yet I hope we shall understand each other.

Many besides myself, who have counted ourselves lovers of Handel, must have had twinges of conscience when their eyes fell upon the four volumes (in the G.H.S. great edition of Handel's works) which contain his cantatas. I may remind you that the Italian cantata of the late seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries is a form of music which differs from that of the German cantata, of which Bach has given us so many examples; that it supplanted the madrigal as the popular musical diversion of cultivated society in Italy; that it held the place as vocal chamber music, which instrumental quartets and trios were later to occupy; that all the best Italian composers from Carrissimi to Scarlatti produced them in large quantities; and lastly that Italy, when Handel went there in 1706, was the acknowledged centre of European music. What Handel composed there—whatever its value may be—was composed for the most important and the most cultivated audiences he was ever likely to find.

The Mozart Celebrations of 1931 do not seem to have created much stir, perhaps because there is no very compelling magic in the numbers 175 and 140—for it was, you will remember, the 175th anniversary of the composer's birth and the 140th of his death—but it produced, as all such occasions do, a considerable crop of literature, good, bad and indifferent, the perusal of which must have caused many readers besides the present lecturer to reflect on the great change that has taken place in critical opinion about Mozart in recent years. The simple nineteenth century view which saw in Mozart the supreme master of formal beauty, and tended to take for granted the elements of which that beauty is made up, has given way to a spirit of inquiry which will take nothing on trust, and seeks to find out exactly what we mean by the Mozartian style before appraising it in general terms.

I feel that my presence here requires a double apology for I can claim to be neither an authority on eighteenth century music nor a pianist. My interest in eighteenth century music is mainly a practical one and my only claim to your attention is that I have in certain transcriptions and arrangements both for the concert hall and the theatre succeeded, I hope, in popularising certain old music which might otherwise have remained familiar only to the scholar. As a pianist my limitations are even more marked and I can hardly hope to demonstrate that, as a writer for the keyboard, Roseingrave was second only to Domenico Scarlatti. Roseingrave's most striking work, however, lies not so much in his brilliant toccata-like movements as in his more introspective and experimental voluntaries and I hope that later on I may be able to give at least some slight account of these fascinating and original works.

The only professor of Greek I have ever known who was also a musician always refused on principle to give me any help with a stiff passage from a Greek author on music. His reply was always the same: “Put that stuff away. Nobody has ever made head or tail of Greek music, and nobody ever will. That way madness lies.” It was in vain I promised to become a harmless lunatic. I respect his opinion, and my own. Among what looks like a heap of lumber two things have taken my fancy and engaged my attention at intervals during a lengthy period consisting mainly of interruptions. One thing is the way the Pythagoreans had of defining musical intervals by ratios. Their methods can be much improved and simplified by means of two tools of British invention: logarithms and tuning-forks. The other thing is the tradition, not altogether vague, of “the genuine and beautiful Greek music,” the lost enharmonic genus. These two in combination promise something of great value for the future of music. I am not going back to what we have already inherited from Greece, to Boethius and medieval music or even to Zarlino and the renaissance. That tale has been told. I am not convinced that there is anything in the heritage of Greece in music now worth troubling about beyond the two things mentioned. This without prejudice to what others may find in that same lumber-room. That a phonetician should meddle with music ought not to occasion surprise. Many of our leading phoneticians have done so:—Wallis, Holder, Thomas Young, Willis, Wheatstone, Ellis. It is in the English tradition. So much by way of apology.