MUSICAL CHRONICLE
ALL summer long, the Bach Festival at Bethlehem has had me under its broad pinion. In the sky it has spread its delicate protective sail; if the season has seemed less long and less crude than it has been so many other years, it is not a little because of the high experience had in May. It was a double source of joy those cool green days in the little Pennsylvanian hill-city unsealed. I heard glorious music roundly presented; I found this purest beauty rearing itself like a Gothic dome in a sad American town; and the knowledge that for the hour in American land there has established itself a yearly music festival as noble in plan and in execution as was the Salzburg Mozart festival in the years before the war, has hovered like a benediction in grey and oppressive weather. Formerly, I thought that there existed nowhere in the States a place to which folk fared pilgrim-wise for the purpose of assisting at reverent and accomplished presentations of the work of an almighty composer; a spot wherein an artist has been permitted to create for himself the air most necessary to the life of his thought, and wherein for a day or two performers and audience live as do the lilies of the field merely for the sake of lifting into fullest light an immortal thing. I knew by name the Bach Festival of the Bethlehem Choir. But memories of certain end-season orchestral debauches in mid-western cities, had foolishly deterred me from testing it. To assist at the temple-service of music; to see fall the fruity evening sun as it fell across the Mirabellengarten after Dr Muck within the Mozarteum had sent into farthest space the fugal close of the Jupiter symphony; to feel the night as it lay grand and ruddy and prolonged over the Isar when the fire-music of Die Walküre had dwindled into opal mist, and the doors of the Prinz-Regententheatre were flung open, one had, it seemed to me, to cross sea-water and forfeit the American fact, and to lose oneself in the alien circumstances of a foreign society.
So sadly ignorant I might a good many years longer have remained, had not last springtime a certain orient star led me and several equally unwise persons to Bethlehem, and there let us drink draughts of Bach no whit less full and lucid than those of Mozart
