Launcelot

Shaking his fists instead of a baton, teetering now on one long leg, now on the other, shaking his shaggy head, laboring mightily beneath the warm August moon, Composer-conducter Albert Coates of London one night last week conducted the world premiere of his new symphony, Launcelot, in Lewisohn Stadium, Manhattan.

To the sombre moaning of fiddles, melancholy piping of flutes and rumble of tympani a foredoomed Launcelot was born. Bells tolled faintly in the distance, harbingers of Woe. The scene changed abruptly. Seething with passion the Knight of the Lake invaded the bed of Queen Guinevere. Followed a pallid flashback to Elaine floating on her barge, dead for love. The mood became reminiscent: the love-blighted lily of Astolat guarding the wayward knight's shield in a tower, pining away. The barge motif was again heard. Betrayed, undone, Queen & lover fled Camelot, Guinevere to Amesbury nunnery and the veil, Launcelot to his castle. Final chapter of the symphony was Launcelot, ruled by grief and pain, moving gloomily among the lily pads of his homeland.

When the premiere was over the meagre audience applauded apathetically. Next morning critics in the public prints seemed doubtful, unconvincingly called it "music on the grand scale" or echoed Critic Herbert Hughes's (London Daily Telegraph) florid romantics, printed in the program. Reflective listeners decided Launcelot might be more effective if halved, with fewer thematic repetitions, or conversely, expanded into a full-length, Neo-Wagnerian opera as Coates first intended to do. Bold or brave was he to introduce his work on the same night with such magna opera as Respighi's orchestration of Bach's Passacaglia and Fugue, Strauss's ghastly, gay, Till Eulenspiegels.

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