ABSTRACT
One of our habits in England is to produce foreign works with a flourish of trumpets a dozen years or so after their first appearance abroad; by which time their vitality is generally exhausted and their novelty gone. It was really hardly worth Mr. Fagge’s while to disinter the “ Vita Nuova ” for the sake of saying “ first performance in England." Wolf-Ferrari is not a great composer, and never will be : he tries to graft German methods on to an Italian temperament, and the result is confusion of style. The “ Vita Nuova ” is really nothing more than a student work. Regarded as a setting of a poem that is as familiar to most Italians as the Lord’s Prayer is to us, it naturally loses much of its effect when sung to a translation : and as it was done the other day all the intimacy of the original vanished. Chorus and orchestra ploughed through it in strict time without any of the rubato that the composer goes out of his way to demand in a note at the beginning of the score. The tendency of the music is naturally towards frequent accelerandos and crescendos ; he has accordingly contented himself with purely negative indications of diminuendo and ritenuto. Mr. Fagge’s Procrustean beat however never once allowed the music to play itself, and the naive melodies and simple orchestration, which, treated gently, would have been quite effective, sounded simply stiff and affected.
