EASTER MUSIC

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Christendom has produced four great Easter poems: The Divine Comedy, which is Catholic; Bach's Matthew Passion Music, which is Protestant; Goethe's Faust, which is humanist; and Wagner's Parsifal, which is Buddhist with a Christian facade.

Two of the three pieces for public performance can be heard annually; the Matthew Passion here, and Parsifal in New York. Since we are now equipped with the Loeb Theatre, my proposal is an annual performance of Faust, in translation if necessary; at least the First Part, and the Second also in time to come. Both are done in Germany. Yale gave a magnificent performance of Part One in 1949, the bicentenary of Goethe's birth. They made one bad mistake; used a phonograph recording of Holst's The Planets, when they had to hand the rich fare of Faust music, Wagner's Overture, Liszt's Symphony, Berlioz's dramatic oratorio, and Boito's opera Meflstofele.

Which brings my second suggestion: that the Harvard Glee Club and Radcliffe Choral Society perform and record with the Boston Symphony Orchestra excerpts from these Easter poems, the two Grail scenes, in Act I and Act III of Parisfal, and the Prologue to Meflstofele, which is quite worthy of its two great companions.

It might be well to omit the lamentations of Amfortas from the Grail scenes, but certainly not the witty and ironic challenge of Mefistole who (the idea was of course Goethe's) twits Jehovah on having abjured a sense of humor. Lucien Price '07

(Mr. Price, author of "Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead," is an editorial writer for the Boston Globe.)