In Prague

In Prague, the International Music Festival was held, the latest developments of modern European music were presented to congeries of the cognoscenti.

Das Kluge Fuchslein (The Sly Little Fox), an opera by Leos Janacek is, in technique, the exact opposite of Jenufa (TIME, Dec. 15), his first opera, written 25 years ago. Jenufa was realism--a Czech Wirklichkeit; this work is phantasy. It tells the story of a fox--no histrionic creature, in whose caperings those of humanity are derisively reflected, but a sharp red beast out of the fen. Captured by a woodcutter, he bites a baby, kills a cock, runs away to the woods again. Meanwhile, one Terynka--a girl as pretty, wild, red, sly', as the little fox--has been misled by a rogue who, meeting the fox in the woods, destroys him also. Thus Janacek, now 70, at once the oldest and the most vital of all Czech composers, has turned back to romantic music with the first opera that has ever professed to consider beasts and birds as significant apart from their usefulness as marionettes of satire.

Half Time by Bohuslav Martinu seems to mirror in sound the delirium of a football game--bass-drum drop-kicks cannonading, harmonies lining stiffly against each other, breaking, at a signal, into isolated, screaming units. Critics, adopting this theory, compared it favorably to Honegger's Pacific 231 (TIME, Oct. 27). Said Martinu: "As the composer, I beg to state that Half Time is not a sport composition . . . it registers no football game, no whistle of umpire or protests of the crowd. . . . The problem is one of rhythm and construction . . . a reaction against impressionism. . . ."

Toman and die Waldfec, by Vitezslav Novak, embodies the old German folk story of Toman who, betrayed by his beloved, cannot resist the decoy of the sidelong smiling fairy whose kiss is death. He rides to his bride in a ballad for strings with a background of contra bass. Learning of her treachery, his laughter whirls in the brasses; exhaustion succeeds; the love cry faints into the sliding enchantments of Venus Yertocordia, to culminate at length in a triumphant orgy of brutal discords. "The finale," said one critic, "is like awakening from a nightmare."