Masques, Mayings and Music-Dramas: Vaughan Williams and the Early Twentieth-Century Stage by Roger Savage

Abstract

MUSIC FOR THE STAGE Masques, Mayings and Music-Dramas: Vaughan Williams and Early Twentieth-Century Stage. By Roger Savage. Woodbridge, Suffolk, Eng.: Boydell Press, 2014. [ix, 390 p. ISBN 9781843839194. $99.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, appendix, index.Ralph Vaughan Williams's reputation rests largely on his large-scale orchestral and choral works, and to a lesser extent on his solo vocal music and songs. His nationalist activities as a polemical essayist and activist on behalf of amateur music making have also attracted notice, focusing a certain amount of attention on church music and folk song arrangements that he composed in fulfilment of this mission. Lost in most discussions, however, has been any real appreciation for his stage music. When it has been noticed at all, it has usually been to dismiss it as dilettantish, work of a man who not a born musician of (as critic Richard Capell famously put it in his Daily Telegraph review of 1936 opera The Poisoned Kiss; quoted in Michael Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams [London: Oxford University Press, 1980], 251). And yet, throughout his long creative life, Vaughan Williams was constantly engaged in theatrical projects. He completed six operas, another six ballets and and was forever contemplating more works in these genres (a number of which were left uncompleted at his death). He wrote well over a dozen scores of incidental music for stage and radio plays, and made major contributions to film music. Admittedly, not all stage music matches quality of orchestral and choral masterpieces, but some of it, notably opera Riders to Sea and score for film Scott of Antarctic, clearly does. And 1930 Job is one outstanding works of interwar period by any composer.Roger Savage's new book is not exactly about Vaughan Williams's stage music. Indeed, in some ways, it is not even-or at least, not always-about Vaughan Williams. Its true subject is turn-of-thetwentieth-century musical stage, aspects of which Savage explores in eight widely-varied essays. Thus, one chapter investigates sudden vogue for Jacobean Masque, both in new and revived forms, and relates it to late-Victorian and Edwardian search for a newly non-naturalistic and ritualistic theater that exercised writers like W. B. Yeats and Arthur Symons. Another explores writings and theories of Reginald Buckley, North Country autodidact and visionary who conceived of an English Bayreuth at Glastonbury and wrote librettos for a massive Arthurian cycle that was partially set to music by Rutland Boughton. A third examines work of avant-garde theater director and polemicist Edward Gordon Craig and his failed collaboration with Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes on an English ballet entitled Cupid and Psyche. Vaughan Williams makes important appearances in these chapters-as arranger of one of masques, as an observer and wry commentator on Buckley, and as projected composer of Craig-Diaghilev ballet, respectively-but is not a leading player in them.His role is significantly larger in other essays in collection, however. A piece on 1911 Pageant of London, a mammoth, multiday, open-air production that was itself centerpiece of Festival of Empire marking coronation of George V, includes detailed discussion of suite of folk tunes he arranged for pageant's Merrie England scene. Another, on Gypsophilia, early twentieth-century literary and artistic enthusiasm for fantasized notions of carefree life of traveling people, places special emphasis on Gypsy elements discernible in various Vaughan Williams operatic projects, notably Hugh Drover. A related essay on turn-of-the-century literary cult of vagabond-the essays, travel books, novels and poems extolling the open road that sprang up everywhere before World War I-focuses on composer's song cycle after Robert Louis Stevenson, Songs of Travel, and opera The Pilgrim's Progress that he fashioned from John Bunyan's work of same name. …