Music: Bombster

Black-bearded Composer Alan Bush, professor at London's Royal Academy of Music, an industrious writer of acid, modernistic scores, has long believed that the only important function of music is to encourage revolution. In 1929, while staid London music lovers frowned and looked the other way, London's musical leftists, led by Composer Bush, drew throngs to a class-angled production of Handel's venerable sacred oratorio, Belshazzar. Handel's serene 18th-Century score was sung with traditional massiveness by a chorus of 1,800 voices. But it was so staged that the fall of Handel's Babylonians was made to represent the fall of capitalism, and the victory...