television . life of Miss Nightingale . skilful picture . the BBC &apos;s dramatised documentary on Florence Nightingale last night cleverly managed to suggest the person behind the legend . 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 . most stories of Miss Nightingale begin and end with her work in the Crimea . this one started from that point and devoted itself to her lifelong campaign to improve nursing in this country . the documentary managed to show the obstacles and her devotion . Moira Fraser &apos;s Miss Nightingale was a mixture of the dramatic and the sincere . demure one moment , hard and decisive the next , she caught the dual sides of a complex character . the production by Bill Duncalf compressed a long and sometimes rambling story into a concentrated comprehensive survey of a life work . P J K . fine singing in Henze opera . Glyndebourne contemporary . from Martin Cooper . Glyndebourne , Thursday . Hans Werner Henze &apos;s elegy for young lovers is the first unambiguously contemporary work to be admitted to the Glyndebourne canon . 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 . 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 . 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 . 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 . melody lacking . the composer has a happy gift for musical dialogue as well as for the grotesque , but he is less successful in extended arioso passages . 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 &apos;s moment of self-revelation in act 2 , which was excellently sung by Carlos Alexander . the lovers , whose chief scene was cut at the last moment , had comparatively little to sing , but Elisabeth So&quot;derstro&quot;m gave an exquisitely touching performance and Andr&amp;eacute; Turp &apos;s ringing voice contrasted well with the character-singing demanded of most of the cast . this was in every case excellent . Dorothy Dorow &apos;s visionary old madwoman had considerable musical pathos , and Kerstin Meyer struck exactly the right note of hysterical devotion as the poet &apos;s spinster secretary . too enthusiastically . Thomas Hemsley &apos;s performance as the poet &apos;s private doctor was dramatically shrewd and musically well conceived . the royal philharmonic orchestra under John Pritchard handled Henze &apos;s chamber music style rather too enthusiastically at first , so that the singer &apos;s words were largely obscured , and the composer &apos;s very free use of the percussion made this a difficulty throughout . Gu&quot;nther Rennert &apos;s imaginative production cleverly conveyed the crazy , precarious atmosphere of the alpine inn inhabited by the poet &apos;s court , and his lighting of the later scenes suggested the ultimate isolation in which the poet finds himself . a fastidious composer . journal debut at Cheltenham . from Donald Mitchell . Cheltenham , Thursday . it was not long ago that Richard Rodney Bennett composed a calendar for chamber ensemble . 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 . this new work , cast in five short sections , confirms that Mr Bennett is one of the most musical of our younger composers . he writes , one might say , extremely musical music , of which the sound is fastidiously calculated and yet agreeably spontaneous and imaginative . he does not in this journal write one note too many . one wonders , rather , whether he has not written too few . or , to state one &apos;s doubt more plainly , one wonders whether the invention in this new work is not a little wanting in substance . slender ideas . brief ideas are welcome indeed if they compress a sizeable thought . it struck me that Mr Bennett &apos;s ideas in this piece were not so much succinct as slender . perhaps it was for this reason that the work seemed somewhat pale in character , a criticism that certainly can not be made of Berg &apos;s very rarely heard three orchestral pieces , Op 6 each bar of which , even the most derivative , is impregnated with the composer &apos;s personality . the cruel acoustics of the hall played havoc with textures which are unusually hectic and congested , but Mr Del Mar &apos;s heroic labours conveyed a clear impression of the succession of catastrophes which seems to be the work &apos;s natural mode of expression . there is undeniably something grand about the way Berg throws so many broken eggs into one basket . but one is not entirely convinced that a relaxation of tension might not have secured a more balanced and varied work of art . Anglo-Chinese picaresque . by Rolla Rouse . the Chinese bigamy of Mr David Winterlea : a Manchu-Edwardian fantasy . translated from the Chinese by Henry McAleavy . ( Allen &amp; Unwin . 21 s ) . 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&apos;ao , assistant to the famous sinologue Dr Legge . Mr McAleavy &apos;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 . what the various characters say and do often seems utterly alien to China . 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 . 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 . the period covered by the tale runs from about 1850 to 1913 : and all the characters have one thing in common , their coarse behaviour and abnormal appetites . while there is a story meandering through the book , the main object of many chapters is to record some improbable and unpleasant anecdote . amahs into ladies . the hero , if such Mr David Winterlea can be called , tries to turn two Cantonese sisters from amahs into ladies and teach them English : 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 . 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 . Byron &apos;s vexed repute . by Margaret Lane . the late Lord Byron . by Doris Langley Moore . ( Murray . 2 gns ) . never has a greater coil been made about any man than about Byron . he sowed passions , jealousies , loyalties , scandals , animosities and treacheries as effortlessly as some far worthier characters scatter boredom . 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 can not 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 &apos;s biography . 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 &apos;s grave ? 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 . leisured mischief-makers . 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 . 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 . no previous Byron biographer , I fancy ( and they have been many ) has had access at the same time to so many important manuscript sources . the late Lady Wentworth , Byron &apos;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 &apos;s death . 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 . would that Byron &apos;s memoirs had also survived ! 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 &apos;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 ! Byron &apos;s marriage , the reasons ( real enough though embroidered later ) for Lady Byron &apos;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 bag , not Byron &apos;s consumed memoirs , which at least would have possessed the merit of being well and entertainingly written . 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 . Hobhouse , later Lord Broughton , was Byron &apos;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 &apos;s executor . sturdy friends . Byron as a man is seen at his best in relation to such sturdy male friends . he brought out the worst in women , as they certainly brought it out in him . 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 . 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 . 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 . a modern voice . few people come out of this detailed post-mortem with much credit . 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 : a startlingly modern voice . 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 . 