Item 28 - Letter from Roger Fry to R. C. Trevelyan

1 item

Durbins, Guildford. - Thanks Bob for the sympathy [on his failure to gain the Slade Professorship at Cambridge]; thinks he is 'not made for titles & posts & honours' and does not care if he can get by without them; only wants the money. Would love to do the designs for Bob's opera ["The Bride of Dionysus"] and thinks he could; would manage the scenery more easily than the costumes, where [Charles] Rickett's 'knowledge & experience' would ;give him a great pull'; does not want Bob to think he must choose him over Ricketts, though does believe in some ways he 'can interpret you & [Donald] Tovey better than he could'; would be 'more abstract and less assertive', as he feels 'the great danger of opera is the number of sensations which compete for attention'. Feels the design should be Mycenean rather than Greek.

Appears in Fry, R., & Sutton, D. (1972), Letters of Roger Fry / edited with an introduction by Denys Sutton. London: Chatto and Windus, Vol 1, p 334.

Pencil annotation numbering the letter '112' (corrected from 1111).