Masques, Mayings and Music-Dramas: Vaughan Williams

West Chester University Digital Commons @ West Chester University Music Theory, History & Composition Faculty Music Theory, History & Composition Publications 11-2016 Masques, Mayings and Music-Dramas: Vaughan Williams and the Early Twentieth-Century Stage by Roger Savage (review) Julian Onderdonk West Chester University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wcupa.edu/musichtc_facpub Part of the Composition Commons Recommended Citation Onderdonk, J. (2016). Masques, Mayings and Music-Dramas: Vaughan Williams and the Early Twentieth-Century Stage by Roger Savage (review). Notes, 73(2), 295-297. Retrieved from http://digitalcommons.wcupa.edu/musichtc_facpub/43 This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Music Theory, History & Composition at Digital Commons @ West Chester University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Music Theory, History & Composition Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ West Chester University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Book Reviews 295 Interested parties may search for and iden- edge of eighteenth-century Neapolitan mu- tify concordant sources in the repertoire of sical practice. As contemporary views of his- Italian partimenti and solfeggi from approxi- torical musical training continue to build, mately 1700–1850 and 1730–1830, respec- Peter van Tour’s study will remain a vital tively. Together with the companion Web pillar. sites, Counterpoint and Partimento is a laud- Johnandrew Slominski able contribution to modern-day knowl- Eastman School of Music MUSIC FOR THE STAGE Masques, Mayings and Music-Dramas: Vaughan Williams and the Early Twentieth-Century Stage. By Roger Savage. Woodbridge, Suffolk, Eng.: Boydell Press, 2014. [ix, 390 p. ISBN 9781843839194. $99.] Music exam- ples, illustrations, bibliography, appendix, index. Ralph Vaughan Williams’s reputation Indeed, in some ways, it is not even—or at rests largely on his large-scale orchestral least, not always—“about” Vaughan and choral works, and to a lesser extent on Williams. Its true subject is the turn-of-the- his solo vocal music and songs. His “nation- twentieth-century English musical stage, as- alist” activities as a polemical essayist and pects of which Savage explores in eight activist on behalf of amateur music making widely-varied essays. Thus, one chapter in- have also attracted notice, focusing a cer- vestigates the sudden vogue for the tain amount of attention on the church Jacobean Masque, both in new and revived music and folk song arrangements that he forms, and relates it to the late-Victorian composed in fulfilment of this mission. and Edwardian search for a newly non-nat- Lost in most discussions, however, has been uralistic and ritualistic theater that exer- any real appreciation for his stage music. cised writers like W. B. Yeats and Arthur When it has been noticed at all, it has usu- Symons. Another explores the writings and ally been to dismiss it as dilettantish, the theories of Reginald Buckley, the North work of a man who “was not a born musi- Country autodidact and visionary who con- cian of the theater” (as the critic Richard ceived of an “English Bayreuth” at Glaston- Capell famously put it in his Daily Telegraph bury and wrote the librettos for a massive review of the 1936 opera The Poisoned Kiss; Arthurian cycle that was partially set to mu- quoted in Michael Kennedy, The Works of sic by Rutland Boughton. A third examines Ralph Vaughan Williams [London: Oxford the work of the avant-garde theater direc- University Press, 1980], 251). And yet, tor and polemicist Edward Gordon Craig throughout his long creative life, Vaughan and his failed collaboration with Sergei Williams was constantly engaged in theatri- Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes on an “English cal projects. He completed six operas, an- ballet” entitled Cupid and Psyche. Vaughan other six ballets and “masques,” and was Williams makes important appearances in forever contemplating more works in these these chapters—as the arranger of one of genres (a number of which were left un- the masques, as an observer and wry com- completed at his death). He wrote well over mentator on Buckley, and as the projected a dozen scores of incidental music for stage composer of the Craig–Diaghilev ballet, and radio plays, and made major contribu- respectively—but is not a leading player in tions to film music. Admittedly, not all the them. stage music matches the quality of the or- His role is significantly larger in other es- chestral and choral masterpieces, but some says in the collection, however. A piece on of it, notably the opera Riders to the Sea and the 1911 Pageant of London, a mammoth, the score for the film Scott of the Antarctic, multiday, open-air production that was it- clearly does. And the 1930 ballet Job is one self the centerpiece of the “Festival of Em - the outstanding works of the interwar pire” marking the coronation of George V, period by any composer. includes detailed discussion of the suite of Roger Savage’s new book is not exactly folk tunes he arranged for the pageant’s “about” Vaughan Williams’s stage music. “Merrie England” scene. Another, on 296 Notes, December 2016 “Gypsophilia,” the early twentieth-century others—to come to the fore. Reading this literary and artistic enthusiasm for fanta- book, it becomes clear that these topics are sized notions of the carefree life of the as vital to an understanding of the com- “traveling people,” places special emphasis poser and his music as the many very well- on Gypsy elements discernible in various trod themes (folklorism, revivalism, anti- Vaughan Williams operatic projects, no- quarianism, paganism, etc.) that the book tably Hugh the Drover. A related essay on also covers. Future scholars neglecting this the turn-of-the-century literary “cult of the expansion of topics will do so at their peril. vagabond”—the essays, travel books, novels Of course, it is not just in its thematic al- and poems extolling “the open road” lusiveness that the volume compels, but that sprang up everywhere before World also in the methodological sophistication War I—focuses on the composer’s song by which themes are shown to intersect. cycle after Robert Louis Stevenson, Songs of Thus in the essay on vagabondage, Savage Travel, and the opera The Pilgrim’s Progress touches on German Romantic notions of that he fashioned from John Bunyan’s work wanderlust and its reemergence in turn-of- of the same name. the-century Britain; the vogue for walking Where the composer emerges as the imagery in contemporary painting, music, undisputed “leading man” is in the remain- and especially literature (where it surfaced ing two essays. The first examines the 1929 in both “popular” and “highbrow” publica- opera Sir John in Love, the inspiration for tions); the broadly liberal and even utopian which Savage traces back to Vaughan aesthetics of the movement (a metaphor, Williams’s two stints as musical director of basically, for escape from conformity and Frank Benson’s theatrical troupe at urbanization); and even the ways that Stratford-upon-Avon for several weeks dur- older, somewhat intransigent literary texts ing 1912 and 1913. The second explores such as The Pilgrim’s Progress were compre- Vaughan Williams’s role in the revival of hensively reinterpreted according to its Henry Purcell’s stage (and other) works, ar- lights. All of this on top of a first-rate bio- guing somewhat surprisingly that, with graphical and compositional explication Benjamin Britten, he was “perhaps the of Vaughan Williams’s own involvement in most committed” (p. 144) of a long line of the walking movement. The essay on Purcellians that included Charles Villiers Gypsophilia, meanwhile, is even more wide- Stanford, Bernard Shaw, Gustav Holst, ranging, touching not only on its appear- Peter Warlock, and Michael Tippett. ance in the various artistic media of the The unsteady focus on Vaughan Williams period but also on its connections to con- is more apparent than real, as Savage, a dis- temporaneous developments in folklore tinguished music theater historian, works (the Gypsy Lore Society), revivalism (song to show how the period’s variegated theatri- collecting work with Gypsies), and even cal concerns all ended up involving the classical scholarship (the theories of the so- composer in some way. As such, he pro- called Cambridge Ritualists who were just vides a valuable service in demonstrating then tracing the agon [struggle] of classical that, however we may view him today, Greek theater back to ancient fertility Vaughan Williams emphatically saw himself rites). Savage, a longtime (now retired) as a “musician of the theater.” Further, member of the Department of English in writing a book that places the early Literature at the University of Edinburgh, twentieth-century English theater at the is at his virtuosic best in linking the many very center of the period’s artistic and cul- different kinds of literary texts he invokes. tural preoccupations, Savage demonstrates He draws extensively on family and social yet another way that we can assess Vaughan networks, as well as on contemporaneous Williams’s centrality to the era. This is newspaper reports, to make unexpected where the book’s seeming lack of focus but wonderfully apt connections, and he emerges as a strength, for the freewheeling shows an amazing knowledge of small and approach permits topics not normally part often obscure details from Vaughan of the Vaughan Williams discourse— Williams’s life and works to drive these con- “vagabondage” and Gypsophilia, but also nections home. Savage, it seems, has read suffragism, futurism, racism and eugenics, everything, and as he leaves no stone un- spiritualism, “Merrie Englandism,” imperi- turned, we are treated to an extraordinarily alism, Wagnerism, and ritualism, among rich portrait of an entire milieu.

Load more