Television .sx LIFE OF MISS NIGHTINGALE .sx SKILFUL PICTURE .sx The BBC's dramatised documentary on Florence Nightingale last night cleverly managed to suggest the person behind the legend .sx While never minimising the immensity of her work , it lifted the saintly halo which usually surrounds her name to reveal a warm , dedicated person who accomplished most by perseverance and hard work .sx Most stories of Miss Nightingale begin and end with her work in the Crimea .sx This one started from that point and devoted itself to her lifelong campaign to improve nursing in this country .sx The documentary managed to show the obstacles and her devotion .sx Moira Fraser's Miss Nightingale was a mixture of the dramatic and the sincere .sx Demure one moment , hard and decisive the next , she caught the dual sides of a complex character .sx The production by Bill Duncalf compressed a long and sometimes rambling story into a concentrated comprehensive survey of a life work .sx P. J. K. FINE SINGING IN HENZE OPERA .sx GLYNDEBOURNE " CONTEMPORARY " .sx From MARTIN COOPER .sx GLYNDEBOURNE , Thursday .sx HANS WERNER HENZE'S " Elegy for Young Lovers " is the first unambiguously " contemporary " work to be admitted to the Glyndebourne canon .sx By no means a masterpiece , it is in many respects a representative modern work and the composer is a highly skilled manipulator of contemporary idioms , with a strong sense of words and situation .sx The libretto , by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman , is largely a satire on the petty court surrounding an ageing poet , whose deeply egocentric character leads him to sacrifice everything to his need of inspiration .sx Henze obtains his musical characterisation by means of individual instrumental timbres and " personal " intervals , and the result is often less delineation of character than caricature .sx This is also the chief , or at least the most successfully executed trait of the libretto , which contains an odd blend of highly poetic phraseology and schoolboy humour .sx MELODY LACKING .sx The composer has a happy gift for musical dialogue as well as for the grotesque , but he is less successful in extended arioso passages .sx The more serious scenes of the opera were in fact often uninteresting owing to the absence of any memorable melodic invention , but an exception was the Poet's moment of self-revelation in Act =2 , which was excellently sung by Carlos Alexander .sx The lovers , whose chief scene was cut at the last moment , had comparatively little to sing , but Elisabeth " derstro"m gave an exquisitely touching performance and Andre@2 Turp's ringing voice contrasted well with the character-singing demanded of most of the cast .sx This was in every case excellent .sx Dorothy Dorow's visionary old madwoman had considerable musical pathos , and Kerstin Meyer struck exactly the right note of hysterical devotion as the Poet's spinster secretary .sx TOO ENTHUSIASTICALLY .sx Thomas Hemsley's performance as the Poet's private doctor was dramatically shrewd and musically well conceived .sx The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under John Pritchard handled Henze's chamber music style rather too enthusiastically at first , so that the singer's words were largely obscured , and the composer's very free use of the percussion made this a difficulty throughout .sx " nther Rennert's imaginative production cleverly conveyed the crazy , precarious atmosphere of the Alpine inn inhabited by the Poet's court , and his lighting of the later scenes suggested the ultimate isolation in which the Poet finds himself .sx A FASTIDIOUS COMPOSER .sx 'JOURNAL' DEBUT AT CHELTENHAM .sx From DONALD MITCHELL .sx CHELTENHAM , Thursday .sx IT was not long ago that Richard Rodney Bennett composed a " Calendar " for chamber ensemble .sx Now he has written a " Journal " for orchestra which was given its first performance in the Town Hall , Cheltenham , to-night by the B.B.C. Symphony Orchestra conducted by Norman Del Mar .sx This new work , cast in five short sections , confirms that Mr. Bennett is one of the most musical of our younger composers .sx He writes , one might say , extremely musical music , of which the sound is fastidiously calculated and yet agreeably spontaneous and imaginative .sx He does not in this " Journal " write one note too many .sx One wonders , rather , whether he has not written too few .sx Or , to state one's doubt more plainly , one wonders whether the invention in this new work is not a little wanting in substance .sx SLENDER IDEAS .sx Brief ideas are welcome indeed if they compress a sizeable thought .sx It struck me that Mr. Bennett's ideas in this piece were not so much succinct as slender .sx Perhaps it was for this reason that the work seemed somewhat pale in character , a criticism that certainly cannot be made of Berg's very rarely heard Three Orchestral Pieces , Op .sx 6 each bar of which , even the most derivative , is impregnated with the composer's personality .sx The cruel acoustics of the hall played havoc with textures which are unusually hectic and congested , but Mr. Del Mar's heroic labours conveyed a clear impression of the succession of catastrophes which seems to be the work's natural mode of expression .sx There is undeniably something grand about the way Berg throws so many broken eggs into one basket .sx But one is not entirely convinced that a relaxation of tension might not have secured a more balanced and varied work of art .sx ANGLO-CHINESE PICARESQUE .sx By ROLLA ROUSE .sx The Chinese Bigamy of Mr. David Winterlea :sx a Manchu-Edwardian Fantasy .sx Translated from the Chinese by Henry McAleavy .sx ( Allen & Unwin .sx 21s .sx ) .sx THE basis of " The Chinese Bigamy of Mr. David Winterlea , " explains Henry McAleavy , was found among the single-sheet " mosquito-newspapers , " full of " an assortment of anecdotes , topical items , and serial stories , " started in about 1870 by Wang T'ao , assistant to the famous sinologue Dr. Legge .sx Mr. McAleavy's version of this " Manchu-Edwardian fantasy " is , however , so free that to anybody who knows China and the Chinese nothing of a Chinese flavour remains .sx What the various characters say and do often seems utterly alien to China .sx For example , we are shown a Chinese host placing his principal guest from the Foreign Office in the lowest seat at dinner , accusing him of being homosexual , and generally behaving as no educated Chinese ever could behave .sx Again , the Chinese , whether drunk or sober , never kiss in public , and least of all would a Chinese monk meeting an Englishman for the first time kiss him .sx The period covered by the tale runs from about 1850 to 1913 :sx and all the characters have one thing in common , their coarse behaviour and abnormal appetites .sx While there is a story meandering through the book , the main object of many chapters is to record some improbable and unpleasant anecdote .sx Amahs into Ladies .sx The hero , if such Mr. David Winterlea can be called , tries to turn two Cantonese sisters from amahs into ladies and teach them English :sx and they on their side plan to marry him jointly and finally to reside , not in unfashionable Kowloon , but in snobbish Hongkong , where he " would have a position to keep up .sx " The main incidents occur on a country estate near London , owned by the Chinese Legation and used by the staff , Chinese and foreign , to amuse themselves , mainly at night .sx BYRON'S VEXED REPUTE .sx By MARGARET LANE .sx The Late Lord Byron .sx By Doris Langley Moore .sx ( Murray .sx 2gns .sx ) .sx NEVER has a greater coil been made about any man than about Byron .sx He sowed passions , jealousies , loyalties , scandals , animosities and treacheries as effortlessly as some far worthier characters scatter boredom .sx The tumult is by no means over , and this being a biographical age and Byron a magnificent documenter of his own life , he has reached the stage ( I cannot remember any other great literary figure doing so ) when a monumental work can be written on the dramas that seethed and simmered after his death , taking off from the point at which the reader is accustomed to close a poet's biography .sx Is it really worth while- one is bound to ask the question sooner or later- to devote years of research and over 500 closely printed pages to disentangling the labyrinthine quarrels , blackmails , machinations and correspondences which raged for so many years over Byron's grave ?sx The answer is , on one condition , that it is ; the condition being that one should have an appetite for detail and for knowing as much as possible about one of the most dynamic geniuses who ever lived .sx Leisured Mischief-Makers .sx The evil that Byron did certainly lived after him , and was even outmatched by the mischief perpetrated by almost every person who had been close to him .sx In turning over the bones Doris Langley Moore has brought to light a great deal of discreditable behaviour and a vision of mischief-making propensities of the leisured classes in the early 19th century which leaves one a little breathless .sx No previous Byron biographer , I fancy ( and they have been many ) has had access at the same time to so many important manuscript sources .sx The late Lady Wentworth , Byron's great-granddaughter , opened the whole of the Lovelace Papers to Mrs. Moore in 1957 ; she was able to continue her work on them for more than a year after Lady Wentworth's death .sx These papers , the contents of several trunks , are the accumulated letters and personal documents left by Lady Byron , who never recovered from the shock of her brief marriage with the poet , and dedicated the rest of her life ( she was 23 when they parted ) to self-justification and resentment .sx Would that Byron's Memoirs had also survived !sx How the ghost of the first John Murray must moan in his Albemarle Street vaults to think how self-righteously , urged and abetted by Byron's lifelong friend , John Cam Hobhouse , he burned them there in the fireplace , condemning the work unread , as Tom Moore said , " and without opening it , as if it were a pest bag !sx " Byron's marriage , the reasons ( real enough though embroidered later ) for Lady Byron's leaving him , the scandal of his love affair with his half-sister , Augusta Leigh , the question of the paternity of Medora Leigh her daughter , the long inquisitorial persecution of Augusta by Lady Byron ( who seems to have been as neurotic as the most ghoulish novelist could wish ) , the patient ferreting for evidence to add homosexuality to incest as an extra nail in his coffin , the unspeakable treacheries of Lady Caroline Lamb , the scarcely less heinous treacheries of Augusta- it is the Lovelace Papers , surely , that deserve to be called a " pest " , not Byron's consumed Memoirs , which at least would have possessed the merit of being well and entertainingly written .sx Equally important have been the Hobhouse Journals , a vast mass of material partly in the British Museum , partly in the possession of the Hobhouse family in Somerset .sx Hobhouse , later Lord Broughton , was Byron's intimate ( if a little stuffy and unimaginative ) friend from their Cambridge days , who had travelled widely with him , been fascinated by him to a point that looks like love , had fanned the enthusiasm which had sent Byron finally to Greece , and suffered years of loyal exasperation as Byron's executor .sx Sturdy Friends .sx Byron as a man is seen at his best in relation to such sturdy male friends .sx He brought out the worst in women , as they certainly brought it out in him .sx There is scarcely a woman in his life besides Teresa Guiccioli , last and most reasonable love , who does not affect the modern reader with nausea .sx The Countess Guiccioli was by birth a Gamba ; her brother Pietro accompanied Byron to Greece , shared the misery and ruinous frustrations of the campaign , and was with him when he died .sx The Gamba Papers in Ravenna have shed some valuable light on this last phase , wholesomely contradicting the lies of that strangely theatrical blackguard , Edward Trelawney , who played a highly discreditable part in the Greek campaign himself , and wished , as did many others , to make capital out of his association with Byron .sx A Modern Voice .sx Few people come out of this detailed 6post-mortem with much credit .sx Hobhouse certainly , though one respects him more than one likes him , Byron himself , who , whenever his voice is heard above the banshee wail ( Augusta , Caroline Lamb , Lady Byron keeping in chorus ) surprises one by his tone of humanity , of common sense , of candour :sx a startlingly modern voice .sx Lady Byron most dislikeable , Augusta a shifty fool and not altogether a nice one , Lady Caroline Lamb a bitch goddess in an age which ( thanks to plentiful domestic service and gracious living ) was notably rich both in goddesses and bitches .sx