instantaneous creations of mood. They recall somewhat the three myths for violin, the attenuated, pastel-like and nevertheless bubbling, capricious, Slavonically graceful music built out of the white harmonic tones of the instrument. For in these whiffs of song, too, we find the composer moving in the compass of what is oblique and unusual and remote in the timbre of the soprano voice. The voice sings falsetto, sings high in the head, over the delicately dissonant filigree of piano accompaniment. Tones that are more boy and old man than woman strain from the feminine larynx. But they are the fruit of a growth in power of intense and subtle feeling over that which gave itself in the shimmering Myths; the fruit of no less great a growth than that which occurred in the composer between the writing of the somewhat etiolated Tristan of the Masques and the far more fluid, acid, and personal Myths. They are as nuggets of finest gold compared to the elaborate chased silver of the violin music. Szymanowski has written no music less external, more from his heart. These songs are the record of sudden searing touches upon a nature most often diffident and cool and withdrawn. They are full of shy whispering emotion, like to the sudden magical fall of a finger of evening light upon some bit of familiar boscage. A few notes, most often like the abrupt involuntary tones pressed from the breast by sudden instants of joy and ecstasy, fix the mood. We feel an event in the rapid breath of life upon the lutestrings of the nerves. The music catches the very essence of the movement of being.
And Alice Miriam was herself those bits of elusive, rapturous life as she stood swaying above the piano placed at her feet in the orchestra pit. She had at the keyboard Allan Tanner to help her with his art lift the songs into light; but it was she herself out of her own rare spirit that made of the five pieces the tiny unforgettable summits. For the brief minutes she sang, there must have been nothing in the whole world before her save the Szymanowski music. There must have been nothing in her for that little while save the wish to make it flutter out into the hall. In her own experience she found those incandescent moments and reproduced the ear-clamour and crescendo of intense feeling. Her gestures were a dancer's; once it was as though she were trying to make the long line of a naked shoulder carry out to the audience her intention. She was herself
