We continue publishing these guiding commen-taries on the classical music broadcast by Radio Orient at half past seven every Saturday and every Wednesday evening, in compliance with the wish of many of our honored listen-ers. This evening we again broadcast excerpts from Scheherazade, by Rimsky-Korsakov, but not the excerpts we broadcast last time. So we return with Rimsky-Korsakov to the atmosphere of Baghdad, with its feasts and its splendor in the age of al-Rashid, as it is pictured in the tales of the Thousand and One Nights.

We must say again that Shahriyar, when he came to doubt the faithfulness of women, swore to kill each one of his wives on the morning after her first night; but the Sultana Scheherazade was able to save herself by beguiling Shahriyar with her tales, which she went on reciting for a thousand and one nights, mingling tidings of war with tidings of love, with weddings and feasts, with marvels, with everything; and whenever he wearied of a tale she carried him to another, or into a new atmosphere, until at last he turned back from the sentence of death.

As for Rimsky-Korsakov, the Russian musician who lived until about half a century ago, he drew his inspiration from that tale, making the pivot of his music that con-test between Shahriyar, who wishes to silence

her so as to carry out the sentence upon her, and Scheherazade, who wishes to con-tinue her tales so as to escape death. He expressed the voice of Scheherazade by the delicate solo violin, and the voice of Shahriyar by rougher strains from many instruments. And around these two voices the music pictures feasts and weddings and all manner of tidings from what the tales of Scheherazade contain.

For this evening we have chosen three excerpts:

The first excerpt is an opening in which the instruments are used all together to represent the voice of the Sultan in a tone of haughtiness and menace, pronouncing his barbarous sentence upon Scheherazade. Then we hear her voice working its art to beguile him and soften his heart.

The second excerpt carries us into an atmosphere of pure Arab song, with a musi-cal accompaniment that joins with that song to form a richer beauty; and often we hear the voice of Shahriyar break in angrily, whereupon Scheherazade returns to win him over with some-thing new.

And the third excerpt, which is the end of the piece, is where the Sultan is pleased and turns back from his decree; his voice, now grown calm, and hers move along together as in evening converse. We notice that her voice grows fainter little by little, but we go on hearing it to the very end of the piece.

Franz Schubert is among the Western musicians who are very famous with us, for he is the composer of the Unfinished Symphony, which the cinema houses of Beirut have presented more than once, and which a great elite of the lovers of fine music has come to cherish. This evening we shall present from him a kind different from all the kinds we have presented before, yet more familiar to us than all of them, because it resembles what we call the setting of poems to music — which is very nearly all that our own music con-fines itself to. Schubert chose brief poetic pieces by more than a hundred poets, among them — of those we shall hear this evening — Shakespeare, Goethe, and Schiller. And he showed such art in creating melody for these pieces that we sometimes see him joining three or four of

them in a single melody, while still marking the particular atmosphere of each poem; and at other times we see him giving each piece a melody of its own, linking one with another in a magical way. It is related of this mighty musician that he could create a melody in less than an hour, under the influence of an inspiration that came near to prophecy. And strangest of all, he could at times hold the bal-ance between freedom in creating the melody and fidelity to the poetic meanings and images to a degree past believ-ing — as though the poem and the melody had come down from a single window of inspiration, so that they could not be otherwise than as Schubert willed them. This shows itself with clear distinctness in the last excerpt we shall hear this evening, the one known as the Sérénade.

I continue these classical broadcasts, with Arabic commentary upon them, twice a week: at half past seven every Saturday evening, and at half past seven also every Wednesday evening.

Tonight I present the overture of a piece entitled Alceste, by the great composer Gluck, who lived some two hundred years ago and was beloved of Europe, and of Italy and France in particular.

We have presented before this his opera

Orpheus. As for the opera Alceste, whose overture is presented tonight, it is counted among the finest things Gluck composed, and among the finest in this genre altogether. In it appears his marvelous power to create melody and to compose the voices around it, to a degree that sets him above all the composers of his age. We might have said that this

opera is free of any flaw, were it not for the parts of it