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

Reviewed by: Masques, Mayings and Music-Dramas: Vaughan Williams and the Early Twentieth-Century Stage by Roger Savage Julian Onderdonk 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 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 the 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, the work of a man who “was not a born musician of the theater” (as the critic Richard Capell famously put it in his Daily Telegraph review of the 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 “masques,” 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 the stage music matches the quality of the orchestral and choral masterpieces, but some of it, notably the opera Riders to the Sea and the score for the film Scott of the Antarctic, clearly does. And the 1930 ballet Job is one the outstanding works of the 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 the turn-of-the-twentieth-century English musical stage, aspects of which Savage explores in eight widely-varied essays. Thus, one chapter investigates the sudden vogue for the Jacobean Masque, both in new and revived forms, and relates it to the 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 the writings and theories of Reginald Buckley, the North Country autodidact and visionary who conceived of an “English Bayreuth” at Glastonbury and wrote the librettos for a massive Arthurian cycle that was partially set to music by Rutland Boughton. A third examines the work of the 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 the arranger of one of the masques, as an observer and wry commentator on Buckley, and as the projected composer of the Craig–Diaghilev ballet, respectively—but is not a leading player in them. His role is significantly larger in other essays in the collection, however. A piece on the 1911 Pageant of London, a mammoth, multiday, open-air production that was itself the centerpiece of the “Festival of Empire” marking the coronation of George V, includes detailed discussion of the suite of folk tunes he arranged for the pageant’s “Merrie England” scene. Another, on [End Page 295] “Gypsophilia,” the early twentieth-century literary and artistic enthusiasm for fantasized notions of the carefree life of the “traveling people,” places special emphasis on Gypsy elements discernible in various Vaughan Williams operatic projects, notably Hugh the Drover. A related essay on the turn-of-the-century literary “cult of the vagabond”—the essays, travel books, novels and poems extolling “the open road” that sprang up everywhere before World War I—focuses on the composer’s song cycle after Robert Louis Stevenson, Songs of Travel, and the opera The Pilgrim’s Progress that he fashioned from John Bunyan...