at the Salzburg Festival, celebrating Mozart's 150th anniversary. Mahler conducted The Marriage of Figaro; Hahn conducted Don Giovanni with the Vienna Philharmonic and a cast including Lilli Lehmann and Geraldine Farrar. In December 1907 Hahn became a naturalised French citizen. In that year he composed his set of six Songs and Madrigals, setting words by medieval and Renaissance French poets in which he incorporated music in the style of Antoine Boësset, court composer to Louis XIII. Hahn followed the dances of Le Bal de Béatrice d'Este with two complete ballet scores, La Fête chez Thérèse (1910) and Le Dieu bleu (1912). The latter was the first ballet with a score by a French composer presented by Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets russes; the premiere went well but the piece was overshadowed by two other ballets with French scores presented later in the season: Debussy's L'Après-midi d'un faune and Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé. 1914 to 1929 At the outbreak of war in 1914 Hahn, who was over the official age limit for conscription, volunteered for the army as a private. For most of the war he served as an adjutant's clerk, working near the front, under frequent bombardment. When possible he continued to compose, writing music for his regiment, contributing to revues for the troops, and working on two new operas, one based on the Odyssey and the other on The Merchant of Venice. He set five verses by Robert Louis Stevenson as a song cycle for children. In 1917 he was promoted to corporal as a despatch rider, and in the last year of the war he was posted to the Ministry of War in Paris as a cipher clerk. For his wartime services he was awarded the Croix de guerre and appointed to the Legion of Honour. When Hahn returned to civilian life, Cortot, director of the newly founded École Normale de Musique de Paris, appointed him professor of interpretation and singing. Hahn was known for the high standards he expected of singers, and published articles and a book, Du chant (1921), on interpretation and singing technique. In 1919 he met the tenor Guy Ferrant, with whom he began a lifelong and happy personal partnership. In 1921 Hahn was invited by an old friend, the playwright Robert de Flers, to compose the music for an operetta for which Flers and his collaborator Francis de Croisset had written the libretto. Hahn had