In London

There began in London a campaign to raise $500,000 to establish a permanent opera company. Prime mover is Isadore D. Elara, a British composer who has been well received in Paris. The project takes the guise of the familiar "music for the masses," in that it plans a box office rate of $1 for the best seats. There are to be no highly paid stars, but a large company with full length seasons. The present Covent Garden yearly season lasts only six weeks.

Among the prominents listed as backers is George Bernard Shaw. One scarcely thinks of the satirical Irishman-Englishman as a patron, but it will be recalled that early in his career he functioned as a music critic. And one of his first successful books was The Perfect Wagnerite with its characteristically Shavian appreciations of the music of the great Richard.