"The Pilgrims Progress": A Vindication and Celebration of Vaughan Williams's Neglected Masterpiece

• Published in: Bunyan studies Vol. 6; no. 6; p. 70
• Main Author: Manning, Robert
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Bunyan Studies 01.01.1995; Northumbria University, Department of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences
• Subjects: British & Irish literature; Bunyan, John (1628-1688); English literature
• ISSN: 0954-0970

The Pilgrim's Progress and Textually Inspired Music'.1 Some of that essay was devoted to an assessment of Vaughan Williams's stage version of The Pilgrim's Progress, which was first produced as part of the Festival of Britain at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in 1951. Vaughan Williams greatly appreciated the letters of constmctive criticism he received from Dent, who, as a former Professor of music at Cambridge University and one of the greatest English twentieth-century musicologists, with a special interest in opera, could be regarded as an expert witness.4 Partly in response to Dent's suggestions, Vaughan Williams made a few revisions to the work, the most substantial being his expansion of the Vanity Fair scene by almost 300 bars of music. Arleane Ralph has already outlined the way in which, over some forty-five years, Vaughan Williams repeatedly returned to The Pilgrim's Progress, eventually making a complete stage version during the last decade of his long and fruitful life.7 She has also mentioned the reasons Vaughan Williams gave for its failure at Covent Garden: its lack of a heroine and of love duets.8 (The lighting and production seem to have been poor, but Vaughan Williams was thinking of the reasons for failure which lay within the piece itself.) Ralph rightly stresses that Vaughan Williams clearly felt a lifelong inner need to write a stage work based on Bunyan's allegory, and to do so in a particular way.9 He prepared the libretto himself. Vaughan Williams clearly stated that he intended his 'morality' to be universal and to apply to anybody who aims at the spiritual life whether he is a Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Shintoist, or Fifth Day Adventist.12 By 'morality', it would seem that he was alluding to The morality plays of the later Middle Ages, of which Everyman may be taken as the type ... these had allegorical texts and their characters were abstractions personified, bearing fabricated names like Good Deeds in Everyman.'2 James Day wrote thus of Vaughan Williams's 'morality': The text and the music divide into tableaux rather than acts, each one depicting a different stage of Pilgrim's journey; it is as if the composer picked up and surveyed different aspects of his theme rather than developing it.