1886. While attending the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he

specialized in the viola under Lionel Tertis, he supported himself by playing in several of London’s theater orchestras. Upon graduating from the Academy, Coates became violist with several string quartets, including the Hambourg String Quartet with which he toured South Africa in 1908. From 1912 to 1918 he was first violist of the Queen’s Hall Orchestra. Meanwhile, in 1911 he realized his first success as composer of light music when his _Miniature Suite_ was introduced at a Promenade Concert; after 1920 he devoted himself almost completely to composition, producing ballets, rhapsodies, suites, marches, and so forth, that were heard around the world. In 1930, his valse-serenade _Sleepy Lagoon_ achieved a phenomenal success in London; with lyrics by Jack Lawrence and in a popular-song arrangement by Dr. Albert Sirmay, it made in 1942 seventeen appearances on the American “Hit Parade,” twice in first place. Coates appeared as guest conductor throughout the music world, visiting the United States in 1946 and 1955, on both occasions conducting concerts of his music over the radio networks. In 1957 he became president of the British Light Music Association. He died in Chichester, England, on December 21, 1957. In _Four Centuries_, a suite for orchestra (1941), Coates created a four-movement work, each of which was in a musical style of a different century. The first movement is a fugue, the second pavane, the third Valse, and the last is called “Jazz.” _London Suite_ (1932), for orchestra, is one of his best known works inspired by the city dearest to his heart. As he himself wrote: “My best inspiration is to walk down a London street and a tune soon comes to me. When I can think of nothing I walk down Harley Street and there is a lamp post. Every time I catch sight of it a tune comes to my mind. That lamp post has been my inspiration for years.” The most celebrated movement of his suite is the stirring “Knightsbridge March,” one of the most popular marches by an Englishman, perhaps second only in universal appeal to Elgar’s _Pomp and Circumstance_. It has been used as the theme music for a program on the BBC, and when first used the radio station was swamped with over twenty thousand letters asking for its identification. Two other highly familiar movements from this suite are “Westminster” and “Covent Garden.” The former is a “meditation,” introduced by the chiming of bells of the Westminster clock and followed by tunes both gay and pensive suggesting different moods of people strolling in London streets below. The second is a tarantella, a lively dance recalling the fact that the famous opera house, Covent Garden, has also distinguished itself for the performances of comic and light operas. _The Three Bears_ is a realistic tonal picture of the famous fairy tale of Goldilocks and the three bears. An expressive _Andante_ section is intended to depict the query of the three bears, “Who’s been sitting in my chair?” In the gentle waltz section that follows, Goldilocks goes to sleep in the small bear’s bed. A vigorous fast section demonstrates how the three bears discover Goldilocks and chase her wildly. They finally give up the pursuit, go home in good humor, while Goldilocks returns to her grandmother to tell her of her adventure that day. In _The Three Elizabeths_ (1944), Coates provides sensitive lyrical portraits of three English queens, Queen Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen; Elizabeth, the Queen mother, widow of King George VI; and Elizabeth II. Peter Cornelius Peter Cornelius was born in Mayence, Germany, on December 24, 1824. After studying theory with Dehn in Berlin from 1845 to 1852 he became a passionate advocate of the “music of the future” as promulgated by Liszt and Wagner. It was Liszt who introduced Cornelius’ comic opera, _The Barber of Bagdad_, in Weimar in 1858; Liszt was finally forced to resign his conducting post in Weimar because of the hostility of the audiences to this masterwork. From 1865 on Cornelius lived in Munich where he was reader to King Ludwig II and professor of harmony at the Royal Conservatory. He died in Mayence on October 26, 1874. He was a composer of operas and songs, but is today remembered almost exclusively for _The Barber of Bagdad_, one of the most delightful comic operas in the German repertory. _The Barber of Bagdad_ (_Der Barbier von Bagdad_)—whose world première took place in Weimar on December 15, 1858, Liszt conducting—has an amusing text written by the composer himself. The plot concerns a rendezvous between Nureddin and Margiana, daughter of the Caliph; Nureddin’s friend, the barber of Bagdad, stands guard. This amatory adventure is brightened by a series of episodes and accidents in which Nureddin (mistaking his friend for the Caliph) seeks refuge in a chest in which he almost suffocates. All turns out well in the end. The Caliph offers his parental blessings to Nureddin and Margiana. The overture is famous. Its main melody is a chromatic Oriental subject which represents the barber. Another significant episode is the theme with which the overture opens: a tender melody for woodwind and muted strings. These two ideas, and several subsidiary ones derived from the opera score, are developed with considerable good humor and merriment until a dramatic conclusion is realized in the coda. Noel Coward Noel Coward, one of England’s most brilliant and versatile men of the theater in the 20th century, was born in Teddington, on December 16,