In Hollywood

Just as the presence of one literary lion redeems, for an ambitious hostess, the most supine soiree, so the presence of a single preeminent conductor enraptures the patrons of summer musical seasons in the U. S. The "catch" of the Hollywood Bowl is Sir Henry J. Wood, famed British conductor. Recently he put his two feet together on the dais, made his prettiest bow to an audience that was probably the largest of his expansive career--an audience that bulged over acres of ground and crowded into the aisle down which, as Sir Henry bowed, a platoon of Welsh bagpipers marched with a strump of drums and a squealing strathspey. Behind Sir Henry's head the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes beamed at each other. He lifted his baton.

"Now," thought sophisticates, "he will exaggerate." And truly it would have been easy, in the blue evening, to misgage the acoustics of the gargantuan Bowl. But Sir Henry, wiser than his critics, made his effects as precisely as if he had been in a concert hall; brilliantly he conducted a rare Andante of Mozart's, an unfamiliar suite by Pur- cell, the first Los Angeles performance of three movements from The Planets by Gustav Hoist. Sir Henry had been encouraged to give some modern English music; he chose Ethel Smyth's On the Cliffs of Cornwall, a scene from The Immortal Hour of Rutland Boughton.

A chubby little boy named Wood used to persuade the sextons of vast, dim London churches to let him climb up on the organ bench and poke his fingers into the triple-tiered keyboard. Later he studied at the Royal Academy, tried to be a composer, but it was not until he was engaged to conduct a series of Promenade Concerts in the new Queen's Hall in 1895 that his name began to command space in the newspapers. It was then considered impossible to play good music for audiences at Promenade Concerts; they wanted to hear Goodbye, Dolly, I Must Leave You, or the airy ballads that squat Dan Leno was yodeling in the Empire Theatre. "But God bless my soul," said Henry J. Wood, "if they don't like Wagner, why God bless my soul I'll play him until they do." Soon he went further, began to make the British public interested in Russian music. When people clapped, he made his orchestra rise and bow behind him--a practice new to British music.

In 1911 he was knighted. In 1918 the Boston Symphony Orchestra asked him to become its permanent conductor. He refused. Sir Henry is adept at riding on the bicycle, punting, playing billiards, painting.

Bayreuth

The 16th revival of the Bayreuth festival, the second since the War, opened last week with Die Meistersinger. Parsifal followed, then the Ring. Wagnerites crowded the town to capacity, enthused over the general excellence of the performances. New hope was born in Manhattan operagoers with the appearance of Tenor Lauritz Melchior, an able actor with a good voice, who will come next year to the Metropolitan Opera House to help relieve the nasal Tenors Rudolf Laubenthal and Curt Taucher.

In 1872, when Bismarck's iron mastiffs were seeking quiet kennels wherein to rest after their leap on France, Richard Wagner looked for a place to make a home for his old age. He chose Bayreuth--a village three hours by train from Nuernberg, visited by few tourists. With the help of Ludwig, King of Bavaria, he built his theatre--an enormous mousetrap to which the world soon began to beat a path. Nearby, he built his house.

Brave days are still remembered in that house. Along its corridors goes Cosima Wagner, his widow--a grim, gaunt woman with the eyes of a sick eagle and the mouth of a field marshal; up and down she parades, while her petticoat rustles. The whisper of memories, ludicrous, pathetic, stirs to the swish of the old woman's skirt along the empty hall. ... A shaggy little man contorted over the piano, begging his wife to walk up and down the room because he "so loves the rustle of silk. ..." A swollen little man, throned among his friends, shouting: "Go away. Go to the kitchen. That is the place for women. You are talking rubbish when you are talking music. ..." The old woman sits down, begins to tap the floor with her long foot, thinking of Siegfried Wagner, sapless shoot of a strong tree, who went to the U. S. but failed to raise money for Bayreuth (TIME, Aug. 4, 1924); of the night King Ludwig of Bavaria drove alone up the black highroad to Bayreuth to pay tribute at the grave of the dead Wagner; of the multitude of famed musicians, soloists in their own right, who accept a bare living wage at Bayreuth to offer their Art to the Master; of the beer profiteers at the Festspiel-hauser; of the shaggy, the swollen little man, lying on his back in the garden, with earth in his beard and the roots of flowers in his eyes--thinking. . . .