[ Originally published in the Journal of the RVW Society, No 38 March 2007]
by Eric Seddon
[ Section III of this article (entitled “The Piece”) is an almost verbatim account of what I delivered in Midhurst on 26 November 2006. In joining it to the background material prepared before the symposium, I have omitted redundant material and added only one other substantial comment. E.S.]
On the 2nd of May, 1951, shortly after the premiere of Vaughan Williams’s operatic Morality, The Pilgrim’s Progress, E.J. Dent wrote to the composer, offering his congratulations and support of the piece. The general substance of the ensuing correspondence is that of Dent’s solidarity with RVW against the early criticisms that the Pilgrim was not really appropriate for the operatic stage—that it was an oratorio in disguise. Dent was unequivocal in his rejection of such a criticisms, writing instead:
I am more and more…certain that it must be an Opera on stage and not an oratorio. I have read several criticisms and think them mostly stupid and unintelligent. I think I know more about Opera than all the lot of critics put together, and have a more analytical mind than any of them; I am a complete unbeliever and generally a scoffer but I have no difficulty or reluctance to surrender wholeheartedly to Bunyan and to your music. [1]
It is of interest that in the process of defending the Morality as stage-worthy, Dent articulated his own religious position. This rhetorically buttresses his argument, at least, but there is more to it than that, for during this correspondence Dent was to venture into religious concerns more than once. In a letter of the day before, he wrote that“[The Pilgrim’s Progress] does not want a cathedral environment, because Bunyan stands for “pure” religion without the external decorations of a church.” This is of particular importance in this correspondence, for it is the beginning of what becomes Dent’s one real negative criticism of the Morality—that it wasn’t faithful enough to Bunyan. On 6 May, he writes specifically what he sees to be a problem:
The House Beautiful actions are too ecclesiastical, and some costumes too;the atmosphere required is surely not Priestly Authority, Penance, formal Worship and Reverence, but Kindness and Friendliness, Love and Sympathy, Helpfulness on the part of all the heavenly beings (including Evangelist and Interpreter).
Dent’s primary objection in this scene is Vaughan Williams’s decision to conduct the laying on of hands and anointing of the Pilgrim in a manner that indicates the Rite of Confirmation, which would have been directly opposed by an Ana-Baptist such as Bunyan. He is also bothered by the costumes of the inhabitants of the House Beautiful, which, according to the original staging, implied a monastic community; likewise incompatible with Bunyan’s Puritanism. Later in the same letter he added a similar objection:
…did Bunyan imagine [Pilgrim] wearing the traditional “pilgrim” dress with cockle-shell hat and staff? In any case I think a hat and staff would often help to suggest pilgrimage; he sometimes looks too “ecclesiastical” without them.
Vaughan Williams’s reply makes his position clear concerning the sacramental and “ecclesiastical” elements which Dent found alarming. In his response of 17 May, he writes:
As regards the Religious aspect of the H[ouse] B[eautiful], I like the landscape back-cloths on the whole. In “House Beautiful” what we want is a scene of initiation, which I have made by expanding two sentences of Bunyan.
Towards the close of the letter, RVW adds this telling statement:
You refer a good deal to Bunyan, but remember that this is not Bunyan but only adapted from Bunyan. He would certainly have had a fit at some of the things I do!
Vaughan Williams was therefore well aware of the sacramental and ecclesiastical elements written into the Morality; it is clear by this response that they were intentional. It is interesting to note, too, that Dent was not the only one to pick up on the “ecclesiastical issue” embedded in the Morality. In Nathaniel Lew’s survey of the early criticism of the Pilgrim, he writes that “many were troubled by the obvious similarity of much of the opera to High Church ritual, finding it… a violation of the spirit of Bunyan”, going on to cite, among others, the following criticisms:
‘I don’t think Bunyan, sturdy independent as he was, would have approved of what Vaughan Williams has done with his book’ (Daily Mail, 1951)
‘The extraordinary clarity and vividness of [Bunyan’s] original is obscured in heavy-handed ritual that destroys simplicity without adding anything illuminating, and which, with its suggestion of Puseyite fal-lals, would certainly have outraged Bunyan’ (Glasgow Herald, 1951) [2]
These criticisms cannot be dismissed as mere tirades. They point to several substantial elements, such as those mentioned by Dent to VW in private, and more. What the critics lacked, however, was the knowledge that VW had done these things deliberately and that his treatment of Bunyan’s book is emblematic for his career. To find sacramentalism in The Pilgrim’s Progress, for instance, would not have shocked anyone who had deeply considered the musical and textual symbolism that permeated many of his earlier works. Over the course of his career, a relatively clear trajectory can be traced through many of RVW’s most important pieces, detailing a continued fascination with and investigation of Christian mysticism and even sacramentalism—the two sometimes intertwining in profound unity.
The immediate question to be asked is why. Vaughan Williams, after all, is a composer whom the majority of scholars have identified as a youthful atheist turned something of a cheerful agnostic—a man who supposedly accepted the ethical and social structure generated by the waning remnants of a dominantly Christian society, while permanently rejecting Christianity’s supernatural claims. His setting of Christian texts have therefore been interpreted in much the same way that Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex has been: just as Stravinsky was able to set a play that had its roots in pagan Greece without being a pagan himself (the argument goes), so Vaughan Williams was able to interact with the texts of Christianity.[3] The supposition is that RVW saw Christian texts as mere symbols among many others: that a Jungian type of syncretism was at work.
This supposition creates many problems, however; perhaps the greatest being that its application yields only a superficial understanding of the symbolism within the pieces themselves. For example, the fourth of Vaughan Williams’s Five Mystical Songs (‘Love Bade Me Welcome’) derives its spiritual power from the deepest aspect of Catholic Eucharistic theology—it contains symbolism without parallel in other religions or cultures, and cannot be understood without a specifically Christian, even Catholic, context.[4] Thus, for adequate analysis, theology is needed. It is one thing to use a symbol out of context, distancing it deliberately that it might be appropriated for another purpose (as classical thought has long been appropriated by Christian poets)—but it is another thing to do what RVW did, writing pieces which can only be fully investigated by using the very mystical theology that scholars have assumed he rejected.
A further problem is that Vaughan Williams’s music has been analyzed, following the musicological zeitgeist of the 20th century, in an exclusively secular, materialist manner. The debate as to how to interpret the meaning of his scores has been dominated by the assumption that they might only be said to express that which scholars can prove he definitively believed. This proposition can only be maintained by yet another assumption: that reality is only definable by individual perception (thus making radical subjectivism the only possible criteria for determining reality), coupled with the reductive assertion that a work of art might only contain what an artist could consciously define and verbally articulate. Yet Vaughan Williams himself held no such assumptions about life and art. Throughout his career, he repeatedly clarified his understanding of music, the most expansive and eloquent utterance of his philosophy coming in 1948, when he wrote that “music is not only an ‘entertainment’, nor a mere luxury, but a necessity of the spiritual if not the physical life, an opening of those magic casements through which we can catch a glimpse of that country where ultimate reality will be found.”[5] He reiterated this concisely in 1954, stating “Music is a reaching out to the ultimate realities by means of ordered sound.”[6] Such statements assume not radical subjectivism, but are informed by a conviction that truth is both external to the individual and absolute. Likewise, RVW’s reiteration of Mendelssohn’s idea that “the meaning of music is too precise for words” attests to, at the very least, his own inability to verbally delve into the depths of meaning his art contained. To then impose a radical subjectivist method of analysis upon his works is at the very least to interpret them in a manner inconsistent with the way in which they were written.
All of this has been exacerbated by an incomplete understanding of Vaughan Williams’s historical context. While scholars have occasionally looked into the political climate of his compositions, the more important contexts of religious and spiritual history have been consistently and perhaps conveniently dismissed as unimportant—the unspoken first principle of radical subjectivism forming an intellectual roadblock to any such inquiry.
This exclusion of theological analysis has resulted in a shallow reading of Vaughan Williams’s music, ultimately creating, in theory, an abundance of “problem” pieces: Dona Nobis Pacem, Hodie, the Magnificat and Sancta Civitas come immediately to mind. Perhaps the piece which has suffered most from this criticism, however, is Vaughan Williams’s magnum opus, The Pilgrim’s Progress. The objective of this essay is to clarify Vaughan Williams’s religious context and, by means of identifying the theological symbolism embedded in the very structure of the opera, reveal The Pilgrim’s Progress for the masterpiece it truly is.
II. THE BACKGROUND
In his fascinating study of meaning within the works of RVW, Wilfrid Mellers suggests that the inception of The Pilgrim’s Progress dates from 1904, when Vaughan Williams set Bunyan’s ‘He who would valiant be’ to a folk tune collected by the composer in Sussex on 24 May of the same year.[7] The setting was made for inclusion in The English Hymnal, the musical editing of which was arguably the most important turning point—musically speaking—of the composer’s career. More than providing the impetus for his first text setting of Bunyan, however, Vaughan Williams’s work on the Hymnal was to prove decisive for the musical content and structure of The Pilgrim’s Progress, for two of the building blocks for the future Morality were first presented there: the hymn tune York and Tallis’s Third Mode Melody.
The appearance of the Rev Percy Dearmer, general editor of the Hymnal, in the life of Ralph Vaughan Williams was one of those unexpected meetings which have implications beyond their immediate occasion. England at that time was already fully engaged in the first great flourish of her musical renaissance—Elgar, Stanford and Parry were all at work, while a younger generation of talent was beginning to come of age. Vaughan Williams, though the composer of at least one rousing commercial success in the form of “Linden Lea”, was hardly a household name, and it is doubtful that his record as an organist at St Barnabas’s, South Lambeth (a post which he loathed and left on strained terms)[8] resulted in a glowing reputation as a Church musician. Besides this, if Vaughan Williams scholars of the past are correct in assuming atheism for the composer’s early years, that RVW and Dearmer would end up working together at all, let alone for two years and at great expense to the composer, seems decidedly unlikely. Yet there were striking similarities between the two men and enough common ground, even regarding their own backgrounds, to suggest at least a possibility as to why Dearmer would approach RVW and why they would work so well together. More pertinently to the present article, I believe looking into this relationship to Dearmer sheds light upon why there was strong sacramental symbolism in Vaughan Williams’s works, reaching all the way to The Pilgrim’s Progress of 1951.
Percy Dearmer was an Anglo-Catholic priest, educated at Christ Church Oxford from 1886-1889, in the years after the decline of the Oxford Movement. Prior to his education there, in 1882, one of the founding members and most dominant figures of the movement, Edward Pusey, had died. Pusey had been the Professor of Hebrew at Christ-Church from 1829 and, with John Keble and John Henry Newman, had formed the triumvirate that defined the movement, which sought to counteract growing theological liberalism in the Church of England while exploring reunion with the Roman Catholic Church. Yet the implications of their work were not limited to theology—the Oxford Movement had a significant impact upon Church music and served as a catalyst for the revival of interest in medieval carols and native folk-song. This unique concern for cultural retrieval therefore had a direct impact upon the musical life and work of RVW. Of particular interest to musical history is that, in Pusey’s own opinion, the Movement’s source was neither a sermon nor a Tract for the Times, but Keble’s publication of The Christian Year, which firmly established the literary hymn in Anglican circles.[9]
By the time of Dearmer’s studies at Oxford, however, the movement’s direct influence had long been in decline. The leaders had each been silenced or thwarted at one point or another and Newman, the movement’s guiding theologian, had converted to Roman Catholicism. Pusey, however, had remained in the Church of England, and it is largely his influence that shaped the future of Anglo-Catholicism. Retreating from the threatening theological positions of the earlier movement, Pusey continued to strive for a revival of the liturgy, and to focus ever more in the direction of social justice. Detractors of this continued movement associated it so deeply with Pusey, in fact, that it was sometimes referred to as “Puseyism”[10]—a term which would last in the popular imagination long after the turn of the century. Vaughan Williams’s Pilgrim, as we have already seen, was derided by a Glasgow critic as containing “Puseyite fal-lals.” It is unlikely, however, that the reviewer was aware of just how firmly he had struck Vaughan Williams’s own family tree—and one of the potential reasons why Dearmer and Vaughan Williams might have met and got along so well.
When discussing family history, Vaughan Williams scholars have understandably tended to focus on the Darwin and Wedgwood branches, the Rev Arthur Vaughan Williams having died at Down Ampney only two years after the birth of his famous son. But there are reasons for looking more closely at the composer’s father when considering the roots of his son’s musical expression and symbolism. The first is that, like Dearmer, Arthur Vaughan Williams was educated at Christ Church Oxford, taking his B.A. in 1857 and his M.A. in 1860,[11] beginning his time there just six years after Newman had converted and the remnant of the movement was under the gathering impetus of ‘Puseyism.’ Moreover, Arthur Vaughan Williams, once ordained, was dedicated to the movement. Percy M. Young, in his invaluable study of the composer, has shown us that the church at Down Ampney was renovated during the working lifetime of the Rev Arthur Vaughan Williams, in accordance with Anglo-Catholic sympathies.[12] Young goes on to discuss the necessity of showing “the connection between the folk-song revival and other local antiquarian research during the second part of the nineteenth century, and to recognize the partial aegis of the Church, in order to fully realize the process which took Ralph Vaughan Williams from a country vicarage and transformed him into the particular kind of composer he became.” [13] This is very perceptive—the folk-song retrieval of RVW’s early adulthood having been spurred on, at least in part, by the Oxford Movement a generation earlier.
Another reason for interest in Arthur Vaughan Williams is that his first appointment as a priest was to Bemerton—the former parish of George Herbert, whose poetry RVW was to set repeatedly over the course of his long career. One need not be a thoroughgoing Freudian to appreciate the symbolism this poet must have held, at least in part, for the cleric’s son. And perhaps most significantly, it was his father’s close friend, Herbert Fisher, also a Christ Church Oxford man, who was the father of Vaughan Williams’s first wife, Adeline. Thus it seems that the shape of RVW’s early adulthood, from the time of his marriage to Adeline Fisher to his involvement with the English Hymnal, bears a particularly strong influence of Arthur Vaughan Williams. Whether this was the result of a conscious effort on Ralph Vaughan Williams’s part to learn more about his father, or whether it was just natural tendencies that the two had in common is difficult to tell, but the influence seems certain either way.
Significantly, this era leading up to RVW’s involvement with the Hymnal is often referred to as his ‘Pre-Raphaelite Phase’, owing to the dominance of Pre-Raphaelite texts he set during this time (specifically those of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his sister, Christina).[14] This is important for a number of reasons. First, the Pre-Raphaelites were very much influenced and shaped by the Oxford Movement. Spurred on by the invigorating theology, as well as the call to revitalize 19th century art by means of medieval revival, their art ran parallel to the religious work of Keble, Newman and Pusey. In time, critics even associated them with ‘Puseyism.’ Vaughan Williams was deeply impressed by the Pre-Raphaelites, to the extent that his musical philosophy seems to be heavily influenced by theirs. Their tenets could almost have been written by VW himself, W.M. Rossetti summing up their goals as being “1. To have genuine ideas to express. 2. To study nature attentively… 3. To sympathize with what is direct and heartfelt… to the exclusion of what is self-parading and learned by rote.”[15] If we combine these goals with the PRB’s penchant for the exploration of medieval subjects, initially pervaded by Christian subjects and a specifically Catholic sensibility, and John Ruskin’s theories on the high moral role art must play in society[16], we see a foundation upon which Vaughan Williams might have built his career. Indeed, in this context, we can understand the full meaning of RVW’s words from the preface of the Hymnal, wherein he described good music as being a “moral matter.”[17]
This ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ phase is generally assumed to have ended around the time of the publication of the English Hymnal, as he stopped setting the texts of the Rossettis which had maintained such prominence in has early compositions. But I believe he never really got over the Pre-Raphaelites. He might have left their texts behind, but their principles remained. In abandoning their texts, he would often opt for actual Tudor or medieval texts—replacing their attempts at imitation with the real thing. Furthermore, his work on the Hymnal, coupled with his folk-song collecting had enabled him to apply their retrieval principles to music. Soon after this, his Victorian era chromaticism would be entirely transformed. All of this plays into Vaughan Williams’s treatment of Bunyan, which should be understood with this background of the Oxford Movement, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and the English Hymnal firmly in place—for all of this was effecting the composer as he first began to collect and set music for the project.
The allegory was to occupy Vaughan Williams for several decades, beginning with the English Hymnal, and moving through many successive stages, including an important first setting of incidental music in 1909 at Reigate[18], The Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains of 1922, the incidental music for a wartime production of the Allegory for the BBC twenty years later, and the D major symphony of 1943. Other pieces, too, figure symbolically in the opera, notably Flos Campi, which provides thematic material, the understanding of which is essential for penetrating the depth of the piece. The following serves as a brief overview of the major symbolism and overarching structure of this masterpiece.
III. THE PIECE
Vaughan Williams’s operas are an enigmatic group, each one seeming to owe a debt to a different branch of operatic history. Hugh the Drover is Vaughan Williams’s reinterpretation of the English ballad opera; Sir John in Love a setting of Shakespeare; Riders to the Sea is the sung play of Debussy, translated musically to the Irish coast; and The Poisoned Kiss is an operetta. The Pilgrim’s Progress, by contrast, is generally discussed in Wagnerian terms by those who support its inclusion in the repertoire. Yet it must be stressed that the Pilgrim does not comfortably fit into a Wagnerian mold: if it is indebted to Wagner, it is also a profound critique of his work and philosophy. This paradoxical relationship can be seen even in the title of the piece, which designates it as a Morality, Founded on Bunyan’s Allegory of the Same Name.
The word “Morality” has been pounced on by hostile critics for a half century, as proof that the work belongs in a Cathedral rather than an opera house. Yet the term “opera” is not so specific as such critics would like to think. Wagner preferred the term Music Drama, Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande has been described as a sung play, and contemporaneous with Vaughan Williams’s Pilgrim, Stravinsky produced The Rake’s Progress, which is subtitled “A Moral Fable.” Likewise, RVW’s designation is neither enigmatic nor apologetic, but explanatory—something which negative critics have either missed or deliberately ignored.
First and foremost, a “Morality” is a dramatic form: Vaughan Williams was referring to the medieval Morality play, which had been effectively banned by Henry VIII in 1543.[19] Like Wagner, then, Vaughan Williams was recalling an artistic model pre-dating the Reformation. Yet in contrast to Wagner, whose philosophy and art sought a return to pre-Christian paganism (as with the Ring), The Pilgrim’s Progress represents a continuity with the Christian past. It is worth noting that RVW, passionate admirer though he was of Tristan und Isolde, apparently loathed Parsifal. At the very least this demonstrates the limits of RVW’s Wagnerianism, but I think it also contrasts the two composers’ attitudes toward religion.[20] While Wagner desired to replace religion with art, Vaughan Williams seems to investigate religion, and even point to it as an answer, even to the extent of emphasizing a sacramental world-view in the Pilgrim.
Thus, upon deeper reflection, the opera’s lengthy title is important in an interpretive sense: that it includes the term “morality” and the phrase “founded upon Bunyan’s allegory” [emphasis mine] indicates that VW was not seeking complete unity of theological mind with the great Puritan. Instead, he used the allegory as a basis for something remarkably similar to the medievalism so common to the Pre-Raphaelites and to Anglo-Catholicism, both of which were such formative influences on his art at around the time he began writing music for the opera in 1906.
The choice of Bunyan for this medievalist purpose is not so strange as one might initially think, for his art is essentially informed by the Medieval rather than the Renaissance. Though in many ways a figure of his own day and age, theologically, Bunyan’s writing is devoid of the classical imagery so prevalent at the time. As a self-educated man, he would not have studied the texts of Sophocles, Homer, and Virgil: rather his inspiration would take shape from the indigenous folk tradition, replete with giants, dragons and hobgoblins. Though a Puritan contemporary of Milton, his art is uninformed by the vast continental tradition which fed the structure and allusions of Paradise Lost. Instead, it has more in common with an English allegorical and mystical tradition vibrant in Pre-Reformation England. Significantly, Neville Coghill defended his choice of staging decisions for the first performance of VW’s opera in very much these terms, saying:
[Bunyan] approaches the Unknown through the Familiar[,] and his Dream, in this respect, is in line with the great English mystical tradition that stretches from The Dream of the Rood of Anglo-Saxon times through Piers Plowman in the fourteenth to The Pilgrim’s Progress in the seventeenth century and beyond.
Coghill’s analysis is perceptive, especially relating to the art of Vaughan Williams, which can be said to be descended from this mystical tradition. This has significant implications for the opera as a whole, specifically in terms of analysis: it is the theological and even mystical elements at play throughout the piece that form its meaning and shape the power of its symbolism—a symbolism which has tempted scholars to consider the Pilgrim in a loosely Wagnerian, leitmotivic fashion.[21] Yet this parallel with Wagner also strains if too closely scrutinized. Scholars seem to have known this intuitively—other than an interesting doctoral dissertation written by Michael Doonan in the late ‘70s, there have been no serious proponents of a strict leitmotivic reading. The problem is that no real framework for understanding the symbolism has been suggested as an alternative, with the possible exception of what I believe to be a rather insightful, if brief, observation of James Day, who has written that “Music formerly used in one context takes on a new significance when quoted in another.”[22] This seems a simple enough observation, but I think there is a great deal more to it than might generally be assumed. Those familiar with the piece know that it contains an extraordinary amount of self-reference and quotation—more perhaps than any of the composer’s other pieces. All of this was quite deliberate—RVW held onto the piece for decades, and certainly knew what he had been doing. I believe that he was using these moments symbolically—that in the Pilgrim he uses a unique system of musical iconography: the quotations functioning as windows out of the opera, adding symbolic depth:[23] his own musical journey represented in pilgrimage. By illuminating this symbolic and theological content of the opera, interpreting the iconography along the way, the piece’s dramatic unity and importance in Vaughan Williams’s career is revealed.
The Prologue of The Pilgrim’s Progress begins with the hymn tune York, interrupted by an insistently recurrent phrase from Tallis’s Third Mode Melody. From the outset there seems a conflict between the two themes: the stately, confident G major of York, interrupted by the sweeping phrygian motive—restless, insistent, and yearning. Both tunes were first set by the composer during his pivotal work on the English Hymnal of 1906, and both were to reappear before the Pilgrim in his career: Tallis’s melody as the foundation of a magnificent Fantasia, and York in his first opera, Hugh the Drover, at the beginning of Act 2, when Hugh is in the stocks, suffering for love (a context important for its associations with the Pilgrim). Among English churchgoers, the hymns were well known by the time of the opera’s premiere, as part of the living tradition of their hymnody. As such, they might have brought to mind the words set in the hymnal, which seems precisely what Vaughan Williams intended, as the texts frame the opera’s opening conflict vividly. York’s text is a recasting of Psalm 122, a prayer of peace for the Church[24]—the community of the faithful—symbolized as “Jerusalem.” As the opera progresses, the symbolism of the Church will become increasingly important; first in terms of Pilgrim’s arrival at the House Beautiful, symbolic of the Church Militant, and ultimately in the Celestial City, symbolic of the Church Triumphant. These levels of reality are essential for proper understanding of the of the opera, highlighting the inadequacy of secular analysis, which has yielded such confused and often negative results over the past half century. If we accept, for example, Wilfrid Mellers’s implication that the “New Jerusalem” of the heavenly city is somehow indicative of an earthly societal construct, hoped for in political terms,[25] we will have radically truncated the symbolic reflection involved between the House Beautiful and the Celestial City. To suggest that both can be political creations of man is to ruin the drama: there is no longer a gradient, no longer an ascent, and no longer the subtle interplay of earthly symbols reflecting heavenly glory. It also contradicts Vaughan Williams’s intent, as revealed by a letter to Rutland Boughton concerning the opera’s libretto, wherein he wrote:
...as to what you accuse me of -- i.e. 're-dressing an old theology', it seems to me tjat some of your ideas are a good deal more moribund than Bunyan's theology:--the old fashioned republicanism and Marxism which led direct to the appalling dictatorships of Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini, or your Rationalism, which dates from about 1880 and has entirely failed to solve any problems of the Universe. [26]
Here Vaughan Williams opts for theology over ideology—anticipating Hans Kung’s insightful comment that “Ideologies…reproduce the reality of the world in a distorted form, cover up the real abuses and replace rational arguments with an appeal to the emotions.”[27] Vaughan Williams pieces and writings consistently demonstrate a man dedicated to pursuing reality, rather than engaging in political distortion. Perhaps this is why he was drawn to such theological material as Bunyan—sturdy and enduring rather than subject to the whims of intellectual fashion. In any event, the application of ideological thought to the libretto results in a confusion of the real dramatic elements. Specifically, it destroys the symbolic relationship between the Church Militant and the Church Triumphant.
As a corrective, York’s text from the Hymnal should be read as both a prayer for the Church Militant and as a bridge, by combination with the Tallis motive, to the Church Triumphant: it speaks therefore of the prayers of the saints. It has been suggested that the Tallis fragment is “almost a leitmotif for the Celestial City,”[28]but even this qualified statement is a little misleading, as to suggest that either York or the Tallis could serve independently in this capacity is to miss a full understanding of the iconography, for the Celestial City is never truly presented without both themes intertwined. The Tallis fragment on its own can be better understood when referencing it’s original context from the English Hymnal, where it was set to Addison’s “When rising from the bed of death.” The lyric outlines the soul’s struggle with sin and death; with the individual’s fear of damnation, working to peace through Christ’s sacrifice and atonement. That it interrupts York at the beginning is therefore symbolic: the grace, surety, and prayer for the community expressed in York must be reconciled to the guilt, fear, and pardon expressed in the Tallis. Throughout the opera, the Tallis motive is identified most strongly with the Pilgrim’s yearning, his desire to gain the Celestial City, and even with his suffering. As such it stands not for the goal of the journey, but the journey itself: the musical icon of “Pilgrimage.” The two icons presented at the beginning—the prayers of the saints (York) and the pilgrimage of the individual soul (Tallis)—can be understood as the fundamental framework of the opera, expressed musically.
Later in the Prologue, we are given the most recurrent icon of the piece: a four note fanfare (followed by various music throughout the opera), first appearing in the accompaniment as Bunyan sings the title, and found earlier in the composer’s works in the finale to the D major symphony. There are many fascinating things about this icon. First, it is a perfect aural representation of the Cross: usually appearing Do-Re-Sol-Do in triplet figure. Then there is context. The first time it is sung to words is the most overtly sacramental moment of the opera: Act 1 Scene 2, after Interpreter lays hands on Pilgrim, and seals his forehead (with what should be the Sign of the Cross): the sacrament of Confirmation. Here Interpreter sings “Thus art thou sealed with the Holy Spirit.”
The icon occurs over 25 times in the opera, and it is often symbolically used with matching cross symbolism. Most ingeniously, however, is that the first three notes of the Cross are written in retrograde, repeatedly, during Watchful’s Nocturne, to the words of Christ from the Cross (“Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit”). This in and of itself is extraordinary, but even more telling is VW’s indication that Watchful should turn his back to the audience and bless the house—thus the retrograde Cross icon matches the Sign of the Cross seen from behind by the audience.[29]
Critics of the opera have often cynically suggested that the Pilgrim is a throwback to a kind of self-righteous, Victorian hypocrisy; that it turns Bunyan’s book into the story of a lone priggish saint surrounded by sinners.[30] Having smeared the plot in this manner, they then suggest that the music was passe by 1951; that it smacked of an earlier era, out of touch with it’s contemporaries. In short, they brand RVW with the fatal tags of ‘Victorian’ and ‘Romantic,’ in an attempt to discredit the piece. Both of these accusations are false, though it will take some explaining to unravel the problem.
First, though Vaughan Williams is often described as a Romantic, this is simply because he fails to resemble the type of modernist that was so popular in the early 20th century: the artist who favored a technical severing with the past—what might best be described as the artist of radical discontinuity. Out of intellectual laziness, then, unsympathetic critics assert that Vaughan Williams was anachronistic. Yet Vaughan Williams’s art has little in common with 19th century egotism. He lacked natural sympathy with Beethoven’s art, and therefore much of what followed, preferring instead the musical world of Bach, which he suggested was not so much of the Baroque, but of the medieval: he compared Bach to Gothic architecture[31]. One of the primary differences between VW’s art and most of the music which immediately preceded him is a type of detachment on his part, and either an avoidance or a refusal to indulge in the self-gratifying exercise of perpetual self-expression. Discussing the symphonies Frank Howes wrote:
Unlike the Romantics from Beethoven on through the nineteenth century, Vaughan Williams does not turn his gaze inward and write of heart-searching. His knowledge of human nature is not conspicuously less than that of the romantic introverts, but his gaze is extroverted.[32]
Yet even Howes admitted that the labeling of RVW as an extrovert falls short, as his D major Symphony provides both extroverted and introverted moments. The truth is that RVW was not easily categorized in these terms: he was neither fully introverted nor completely extroverted, musically. Thus, the Pilgrim in particular is a source of confusion for much contemporary criticism, which is hampered by psychological models tending to interpret all drama as a search for Freudian “self-awareness”. Once again, such analysis will stifle the breadth of the opera, which represents not a narcissistic type of quest, but a reaching outward to a reality beyond the self. All of this is to be expected from a composer who defined music in external terms: as the reaching out to ultimate reality by means of ordered sound, yet the implications of such an external philosophy have been continuously ignored or missed by the scholars of the last century, hence the easy and erroneous label of “Romantic.”[33]
In stark contrast to ego-centric romanticism and modernism, Vaughan Williams’s Pilgrim must lose himself. Leaving behind his city and possessions, he relies upon the help of others throughout the opera, drawing him beyond his fears, and directing him first toward Christ and the House Beautiful, and from thence to eternal life. Here the initial criticism of the opera by Martin Cooper, that RVW’s Pilgrim is a “solitary saint in a world of sinners” [34] is betrayed as ridiculously false. It is contradicted immediately in Act I Scene 1, when Pilgrim meets Evangelist: the first of many who will help Pilgrim to lose himself on the quest for eternal life.
When Evangelist answers Pilgrim’s full orchestral cry of angst, (“What shall I do to be saved?”), he is represented musically by a motto theme: two stark minor chords, E-flat minor and D minor in descending succession, devoid of any comforts save clarity and surety, ascetically orchestrated by strings alone. (It is worth pointing out that here is contradicted the notion that the falling minor second in the Pilgrim is indicative of evil: Evangelist is hardly evil). Usually the evil thematic material in the opera is represented as a twisting or mockery of an earlier icon. This, in turn, seems a rather profound musical reflection of basic Christian theology: evil is not creative, but only imitative—it cannot produce, but only twist that which was originally good.
As the two dialogue, Pilgrim expressing his fears, and Evangelist offering guidance, the contrast between them is highlighted through the orchestration. Pilgrim’s fears and doubts are tumultuous upheavals of full orchestral anxiety—reaching forte in Pilgrim’s realization that he is condemned to die, contrasted by Evangelist’s firm, pp accompaniment. Pilgrim’s orchestration remains full, though it never reaches f again, as he is gradually calmed by Evangelist. Finally, the full orchestration drops out, and Pilgrim is left with p winds alone accompanying his admission that he thinks he can see a light shining in the distance.
Pilgrim’s music is therefore from the very start in transition, progressing and changing. Evangelist, by contrast, is passionless in the Christian sense of the term: he is constant, steady, consistent. His music is not particularly comforting. Pilgrim’s first experience of the Gospel is therefore one of ascetic qualities—a challenge to give up the passions and possessions which beguile him, symbolized by the sins bundled on his back, which in turn represent death and damnation. There seems no positive aspect to the Gospel at first; it seems a mere denial of comfort, until Evangelist tells him where he must go, which is to the Wicket Gate. Here, as he tells Pilgrim to knock at the Gate, Evangelist’s music blossoms into what Michael Doonan, in his leitmotivic analysis of the opera, has called the Radiant Theme. In actuality, as Doonan also points out, it is more than a theme. Instead, it is a combination of icons first expressed together here in E major, then spread throughout the piece like tributaries.[35] Doonan goes on to explain the significance of the material, as it is not only derived from the thematic material of the 5th symphony—some of its sources can be traced in part all the way back to the Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains. All of this is of particular interest, as it permeates Vaughan Williams’s allusions to and setting of the House Beautiful,[36] thereby linking Act 1 Scene 2 with Act IV Scene 2: The Delectable Mountains, both of which are also unified allegorically as expressions of different aspects of the Church Militant. Most significantly, however, is the melodic material in which Pilgrim sings “for I seek an inheritance, incorruptible that fadeth not away.” This material will actually develop (or settle) into one of the most important icons of the piece: a quotation from Flos Campi, which has significant theological implications for the entire opera.
After a brief setback with his neighbors, who try to convince him to return to the City of Destruction, Pilgrim is chastised by Evangelist, this time more forcefully represented by the low brass and bassoons.[37] What follows is some of the most remarkable scene change music of the opera, a brief tone poem describing Pilgrim’s struggle up the Hill of Difficulty, subsiding as the Pilgrim reaches the Cross, at the beginning of the most the crucial scene (in every sense) of the opera: Act I Scene 2.
The scene opens with a string of major chords, interrupted poignantly by one minor chord in a palindrome of measures, all the chords floating in inversion. The musical palindrome, being non-retrogradable, was also being investigated at the time, more systematically, by Olivier Messiaen, in his efforts to express the eternal aspect of God. The opening of Act 1 Scene 2 has this effect: After the tumultuous Hill of Difficulty, these chords seem to float beyond time. This moment serves as one of the two “mountaintop” climaxes of the piece. The other will be Act IV’s Delectable Mountains. To understand that RVW’s climaxes in The Pilgrim’s Progress are moments of comparative stillness and peace is to penetrate some of the dramatic mystery of the work—ordinary climaxes of action and passion do not apply.
Having said this, after the palindrome is complete, on the second beat of measure 7, the cor anglais begins its grateful plainsong melody, also central to the 5th symphony, as it forms the basis of the Romanza of that work.
The Pilgrim has arrived at the Cross, and his struggle will be completely transformed by this encounter. Here he bursts out once more of his need to be saved, and clings to the Cross—the symbolism of the moment could not be realized other than physically, and the weight of the drama turns on this event.[38] The burden of sin is removed from his back only after he sings, to the very tune of the cor anglais “He has given me rest by his sorrow and life by his death”: a direct reference to the Passion and Death of Christ, the atonement, the redemption. The orchestration in this scene is not arbitrary. Here the music takes on an added symbolism: the solo of the cor anglais is perhaps the most powerful representation of the critique of Wagner in the piece. To explain this will necessitate a digression.
When Vaughan Williams was a young man, he heard Gustav Mahler conduct Tristan und Isolde, and was deeply shaken by the experience. For the duration of his life he remained effected by the opera, and certainly understood the importance of the work musically and symbolically. The “Liebestod”, arguably the most important moment of the opera, features a highly chromatic solo by the cor anglais. Vaughan Williams, too, uses a prominent solo cor anglais, twice, in The Pilgrim’s Progress—both times also signifying love and death, though in a radically different sense than Wagner’s. In the Pilgrim, RVW presents the Cross, symbolic of the ultimate love-death: God’s self-sacrifice for humanity, individually and corporately. In contrast to Wagner, who uses chromaticism to portray passion in a positive sense, RVW tends to use chromaticism in the Pilgrim to portray evil. Modal melody, plainsong and pentatonic statements are used to represent purity and love. Thus the use of the cor anglais in a modal plainsong, describing the pure love-death of Christ for everyone, cleanses and appropriates the Wagnerian symbolism from Tristan. Significantly, the only other prominent use of the solo cor anglais in the opera is chromatic, at the end of Act III Scene 1 (Vanity Fair) as the Pilgrim is being lead to death for his love of Christ. Here we also see a dramatic palindrome: As Christ died for Pilgrim, so Pilgrim must be willing to die for Christ: this reciprocal flow of self-giving is the Christian understanding of true love. And as this true love always bears a cross, so the Pilgrim reaches this transformation in Act 1 Scene 2: from henceforth he will be unconcerned with himself, seeking only to be true to that salvific and sacrificial love experienced when he encountered Christ’s Sacrifice. That these measures seem among the most mystical is not unimportant, for at this moment Vaughan Williams begins in earnest to investigate the mystical relationship between love, suffering, and redemption. He had done this earlier in his career as well, yet in The Pilgrim’s Progress he gives his ideas dramatic form, using Bunyan as a scaffold to unfold a type of musical theology; one which resembles the theology of Catholic mystics such as St John of the Cross, whose writings can be used to illuminate some of RVW’s symbolism.
It is no coincidence that in this scene the most controversial of the stage directions is given: Interpreter lays hands on Pilgrim, sealing his forehead with a mark. What is enacted here is the Rite of Confirmation: the seal of one’s baptism. Vaughan Williams even described the scene in these terms in his synopsis: “The Pilgrim kneels in adoration while the Interpreter seals him on his forehead.”[Emphasis mine]. That ‘adoration’ is the term used by VW is significant, for it implies Adoration of the Holy Cross, further scandalizing the already nervous critics.[39] As he begins to delve into mysticism, therefore, he simultaneously asserts a sacramental theology. And when he was criticized for this moment in the opera, even by his supporter E J Dent, he responded crisply and clearly that it was what he intended: that “initiation” was what was called for.[40] The Sacrament of Confirmation is precisely such a Rite of Initiation. The emphasis here is that Christianity is not an ideology, nor a philosophy, but a community: one which Pilgrim seeks and joins. He has become a member of the Church Militant, on a journey to the Church Triumphant. Significantly, the moment is punctuated by the first sung Cross icon: just as the Sign of the Cross is being marked on Pilgrim’s forehead. The sacramentalism is therefore built into the very music, and cannot be removed from the opera.[41]
After this initiation, the Pilgrim sleeps, the House Beautiful serenaded by Watchful’s Nocturne, based upon Psalm 121. I have already mentioned the iconography of the Cross, repeated in retrograde throughout this intermezzo, but there are other aspects worthy of note. After the introduction, as the Psalm proper is sung, the music shifts to E major, the first time the key has been sustained since Evangelist first mentions the Gate. The Intermezzo itself, added by RVW for the 1952 production, functions as an allegory within an allegory. While Pilgrim sleeps (itself a metaphor for death in St Paul’s writing), Watchful quotes Christ’s final word from the Cross: “Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.”[42] Once again, we have the sacrifice referenced, the love-death of Jesus. This statement is reiterated several times before and after the singing of Psalm 121, which forms the central part of the nocturne. The imagery begins with the lifting up of one’s eyes to the hills—very much an encapsulated version of the opera to this point. The psalm continues, outlining in brief, the substance of the opera. That it fits so seamlessly into the piece is a testimony to its perfection of symbolism within the allegory.
To focus on Act II, Scene 1 is to focus on one of the great choral moments in a career of great choral works. When writing of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, RVW referred to the difficult task of writing music which is both joyful and serious, citing Beethoven and Bach as the only two who had accomplished this, in the 9th symphony and the “cum sancto” of the B minor mass respectively. He also pointed out that these were both in D major. [43] During the Arming of the Pilgrim, he does the same, composing music which is both joyful and serious. The occasion is that of preparation: Pilgrim will meet many threats on his journey, and his arming is a matter of life or death: eternal life or damnation. Yet it is supremely joyful, for Pilgrim has come to knows that it is within his power to endure to the end, provided he relies on the armor he is being symbolically given. Here it is fascinating to compare RVW’s insistent reiteration of the Cross Icon in this scene with St John Chrysostom’s discussion of the Sign of the Cross:
Never leave your house without making the sign of the cross. It will be your staff, a weapon, an impregnable fortress. Neither man nor demon will dare
attack you, seeing you covered with such powerful armor. Let this sign teach you that you are a soldier, ready to combat against demons, and ready to fight for the crown of justice. Are you ignorant of what the cross has done? It has vanquished sin, destroyed death, emptied hell, dethroned Satan, and restored the universe. Would you then doubt its power?[44]
St John Chrysostom’s theology could not have been better represented musically and allegorically than by Vaughan Williams’s setting in this scene. And significantly, when the chorus bursts out into “Hobgoblin nor foul fiend” the key is D major, and the orchestration almost identical to the climax of Beethoven’s 9th.
Also embedded in this scene is the first clear occurrence of what will become one of the most important icons in the opera. As he is being armed, Pilgrim sings “Blest be the Lord my strength, that teacheth my hands to war and my fingers to fight.” The theme is familiar, as it was first written by RVW in the final section, marked “Set me as a seal upon thine heart” of Flos Campi. It’s next reiteration will illuminate it’s mystical symbolism.
Act II Scene 2 features a diabolical attempt to mimic this musical Sign of the Cross, in the fanfare accompanying Apollyon’s threats. Unlike the clear, upward thrust of the Cross, however, Apollyon’s fanfare can only swing down, menacing rather than uplifting.
The battle with Apollyon is, in musical terms, the clashing of this mock cross with the Cross of Christ, a conflict Pilgrim emerges from triumphantly as the Cross blasts in full orchestration, after which the Pilgrim sings “I am more than conqueror through Him that loved me.” The scene represents the world that Pilgrim left behind attempting to pull him back—the temptations getting progressively more difficult. What once was just three neighbors inciting fear becomes battle with a demon claiming sovereignty.
After this, Vaughan Williams provides us with a brief, but ravishing, moment of idyllic beauty. Pilgrim is anointed by the Cup Bearer and Branch Bearer, and encouraged for a third time by Evangelist. Nathaniel Lew has suggested that this imagery echoes the Eucharist,[45] yet there is no way of turning a branch and water into the Eucharistic matter of Bread and Wine. Still, the symbolism is Catholic, in that the water of life is applied like Holy Water. Once again, Evangelist is clothed in the ascetic music of strings, as he warns Pilgrim of the trial to come in Vanity Fair, which opens with a snarling minor second, perhaps as a vicious parody of Evangelist’s own. This is appropriate, as there is no real iconography in Vanity Fair: only the twisted parodies of icons.
If everything in the preceding analysis is either missed or ignored (and most of it has been for over half a century) Vanity Fair can seem, albeit misguidedly, to offer commentators a chance to impose a secular reading on the opera, by pretending the climax of the opera is this scene, and as though the point of it is one extended rant against the evils of capitalism. Yet in its swarming cast of characters, the faces of Lenin, Mao and Marx could easily be added, for the message of Vanity Fair is that money is the only reality: that humanity can be reduced to an economic theory, and that everything, including our sexuality, can be reduced to wealth. Pilgrim refuses this vision of reality: his understanding has been informed by the supernatural experience of Christ’s love. His subsequent proclamation of Truth in the marketplace leads to his mock ecclesiastical trial (reminiscent both musically and dramatically of Hugh the Drover’s), presented here with lines in sinister parody of liturgical chant. Pilgrim is condemned to die, marched off bound, the music dying away in the second, chromatic cor anglais solo, emblematic this time of the Pilgrim’s own love-death. Vanity Fair’s parody of the House Beautiful is complete: it is turned entirely backward. The cor anglais which began Act I Scene 2, emblematic of Christ’s death, ends Act III Scene 1, emblematic of Pilgrim’s death. The House Beautiful has Interpreter, Vanity Fair has Lord Lechery: both want to show Pilgrim “wonderful things.” And after each scene, night falls, the Pilgrim in the Intermezzo asleep, but in Act III Scene 2 facing a deeper type of sleep: that of death.
The following Act III Scene 2 is dedicated to a single aria sung by the Pilgrim in Prison, sometimes referred to as the “Moonlit Psalm.” In actuality it is a compendium of psalms, which Vaughan Williams uses in whirlwind fashion. Beginning with “My God, my God look upon me. Why hast thou forsaken me?” Vaughan Williams once again places the Pilgrim squarely in the context of Christ’s Passion: these words from the beginning of Psalm 22 were cried out from the cross on Golgotha.[46] The Pilgrim has gone from clinging to the Cross of Christ to picking up his own: he has traded the death sentence of his own sins for death at the hands of those who hate Christ. He is participating in the mystery of redemptive suffering. It is not easy—Pilgrim thrashes about in torment over the situation, referencing psalm after psalm, as if rifling through scripture in search of an answer, when at last he remembers the Key of Promise. At this moment of deepest darkness, he remains faithful. The Cross icon sounds in the orchestra, and the Way is shown before him once again, as he is freed from his prison of doubting, departing into the night. The allegorical parallel with St John of the Cross is striking, as St John wrote:
The soul…affirms that it departed “in darkness, and secure.” For anyone fortunate enough to possess the ability to journey in the obscurity of faith, and depart from all natural phantasms and intellectual reasonings, walks securely. [47]
The Spanish monk and the English composer use the same mystical imagery, quote the same scriptures, and draw the same conclusions, as though touching minds across centuries and cultures. Vaughan Williams indicates that he wishes this peaceful nocturnal escape of the Pilgrim to be reveled in, writing in the score “Pilgrim goes slowly through the gate, and is seen for a long time walking up the Pilgrim Way.”[48] It parallels St John’s poem, which has been called the greatest in Spanish:
On a dark secret night,
Starving for love and deep in flame,
Oh happy lucky flight!
Unseen I slipped away,
My house at last was calm and safe. [49]
The parallels between St John’s mysticism and Vaughan Williams’s opera become more pronounced when we recognize the theological symbolism to be found in the music of Act IV Scene 1, when the Woodcutter’s Boy points out the first glimpse of the Delectable Mountains.
Of this moment, Michael Kennedy writes “No words can convey the beauty of the boy’s indication of the Delectable Mountains... Critical analysis cannot penetrate the cause of such magic.”[50] But critical analysis is in fact the very thing needed to reveal what RVW has done here, and there are words to convey the beauty expressed in this theme. They are to be found in the Song of Songs: one of Vaughan Williams’s favorite books of the Bible, and foundational for the mystical theology of St John of the Cross. For here, Vaughan Williams directly references a theme he wrote almost 30 years prior to the Pilgrim’s premiere. The piece is Flos Campi, and the subject is a musical illustration of the love story that comprises the Song of Songs. In the final section of the piece, Vaughan Williams writes a theme in D major, the same key as the reiteration of it by the Woodcutter’s Boy, under the words “Set me as a seal upon thine heart”: a moment describing mystical union with God.
The Song of Songs (also known as the Song of Solomon) is ultimately about this mystical union. Vaughan Williams knew this, even writing in a letter to Mrs. Joyce Hooper in 1951:
[Human] love has always been taken as a symbol of man’s relation to divine things. The Song of Solomon has been treated in all of the Churches as a symbol of the relationship of God to man.
This imagery is crucial to the works of Vaughan Williams: like the poetry of St John of the Cross, it is central to understanding his symbolism. The Delectable Mountains, therefore, represent the fruits of traveling the Way of the Cross, from enduring the Dark Night of the Soul. They represent mystical union with Christ, even here in this earthly existence. The musical and literary imagery is sexual, which seems to have scandalized some secular scholars who have not realized that such imagery is both Christian and scriptural.
In the final scene a unity is expressed, overwhelming in its impact. The Pilgrim crosses the River of Death, completing his way of the Cross (a trumpeted Sign of the Cross sounds on the other side), the York and Tallis themes are at last unified in full splendor, and Pilgrim enters the Church Triumphant in the Celestial City, to live united to Christ forever. Here is the fulfillment of all the struggles of his journey, and indeed the suffering inherent in the Tallis fragment is now resurrected in glory, to the heavenly cries of Alleluia. Here, too, is a final medievalist touch by VW: in the stage directions he writes “All round are heavenly beings grouped in circles like a medieval Italian picture.” His vision of heaven, then, was not inspired by Blake or 19th century Romanticism—not even English, in fact—but medieval Italian. This, in turn, makes sense if we allow for the possibility of a continuing influence of the Pre-Raphaelites upon the works of RVW, farther than previously supposed.
When the vision fades, there is Bunyan, book outstretched, reminding us that “in dreams begin responsibilities,” and offering it to each of us, that we might follow the way, live the truth, and gain eternal life, just as the Pilgrim has. The music fades, and we hear the final wisps of York , as though evaporating in the morning dew.
From this analysis, it will be noticed that the work is intensely unified. Criticisms that it took too long to compose, and is formed of only loosely pieced together tableaux without real dramatic impetus are sheer nonsense, made by those either ignorant or incapable of understanding the symbolism in the work, which is profoundly and uniformly Christian. It could not have been composed any more quickly, as the iconography that is so essential to the richness of its accomplishment would not have been completed had Vaughan Williams not composed the D major symphony and every other important work which contributed to it. Those who can understand this remarkable system, which draws light from his other pieces and sheds light back upon them, can honestly stand in awe of this unique operatic achievement.
Too long The Pilgrim’s Progress has languished, buried under secular scholarship which claimed the composer had no sincere attraction to the supernatural or mystical element of Christianity; no fascination for the deeper aspects of theology. Michael Kennedy has written that “John Bunyan’s book was a lifetime’s obsession for Vaughan Williams, not because he shared its religious outlook but because he saw it as a universal myth of man’s struggle towards a spiritual goal of some kind. In adapting it for the stage, significantly he altered the hero’s name from Christian to Pilgrim, not wishing to tie it to any one religion.”[51] In our own day and age, when religion is so much a topic of political unrest, this analysis seems outdated: VW’s opera is so completely Christian that every aspect of symbolism in it, and the dramatic impetus itself relies upon Christian theology. A late-20th century agnostic syncretism forced onto the piece by scholars is therefore anachronistic, and has resulted only in confusion and the denigration of a masterpiece. For anyone doubting how Christian it is, and how little it resembles any other religion, it is useful to imagine an attempt to stage it in an Islamic republic, or a nation under Marxist rule.
Dubious quotes, taken out of context, have become barriers, keeping us from appreciating its theological depth, the most outlandish being a sarcastic quip sent by the composer to Rutland Boughton, in response to an annoying letter, which certain scholars hostile to Christian interpretations of Vaughan Williams have mistakenly thought strengthened their reductive outlooks.[52] In reality, these scholars have failed: the purpose of scholarship is to expose the layers and depths of a masterpiece, not to obscure and denigrate such an achievement. Moreover, secular scholars have no means of analysis to yield any satisfactory and unified understanding of the piece. Their theories either fall flat or claim that The Pilgrim’s Progress is a failure.
But it is not. Instead, it is arguably the most important piece written by Ralph Vaughan Williams. It stands almost unique in the history of opera—the sacred invading a secular art form and living to tell the tale.[53] The hostile critics who panned it half a century ago would be dismayed to hear of the devotion it has aroused—that it has been performed not only in the UK, but in Australia and North America as well. They would be further shocked to find that it has received two masterful recordings, and that it may well be produced again in 2008.
Michael Kennedy, disappointed in the reception the opera initially received, summed up his analysis of the Pilgrim by writing “Truly, this is like no other opera. Its day will come.”[54] That day is now, if only we will allow the full Christian symbolism of this piece to be presented at last.
Eric Seddon lives in Cleveland, Ohio, in the USA. He is currently writing a book on the Operas of Vaughan Williams.
[1] All excerpts from the Dent correspondence are taken from pgs 596-606 of the first edition of Michael Kennedy’s The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams. OUP 1964.
[2] These and other references to Nathaniel Lew’s essay are to be found in “ ‘Words and Music that are forever England’: The Pilgrim’s Progress and the pitfalls of nostalgia”, Lew’s contribution to Vaughan Williams Essays, edited by Byron Adams and Robin Barber, Ashgate 2003.
[3] Jeffrey Aldridge “A Christian Atheist” Journal of the RVW Society No 33 (June 2005) p. 6
[4] For a more detailed exposition of this premise, see my article “Beyond Wishful Thinking” Journal of the RVW Society No 36 (June 2006) p. 21
[5] ‘A Minim’s Rest’, 1948
[6] ‘The Making of Music’ National Music p. 206
[7] Mellers, Wilfrid. Vaughan Williams and the Vision of Albion. Barrie & Jenkins 1989. Pgs 123-124
Kennedy, Michael. The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams. OUP 1964. Pg. 653
[8] UVW pg. 58
[9] Gillman, Frederick John. The Evolution of the English Hymn. Macmillan 1927. Pg. 241 Gillman summarized the contribution of the Oxford Movement on Church music thus:
“With the Oxford Movement not only did Anglican prejudices against hymn-singing almost entirely disappear, but the leadership in the production of congregational hymns passed from Nonconformist to Anglican circles. The pioneer English writers…were in practice Dissenters: but the leading hymnists of the mid-nineteenth century, when the art ‘burst into almost tropical luxuriance,’ were for the most part Churchmen, who produced a succession of hymnals chiefly for parochial use.”
[10] Latourette, Kenneth Scott. A History of Christianity Volume II: Reformation to the Present. Revised edition. Harper & Row 1975. pg1169
[11] UVW pg. 2
[12] Young, Percy M. Vaughan Williams. Dennis Dobson, Ltd. mcmliii, pgs 15-16
[13] In light of this it seems beautifully symbolic that Hymn No 152 in the English Hymnal bears the name “Down Ampney.” Here we see the meeting point between Vaughan Williams, his father, and the musical project which would change the course of his career.
[14] It is intriguing to consider that Adeline’s mother, nee Mary Jackson, was the model for the Pre-Raphaelite painter George Frederic Watts’s Una and the Red Cross Knight.[14] Perhaps it was through this connection with the Fisher family that RVW’s interest in the Pre-Raphaelites was first kindled, an influence which was to be of the utmost significance in his development as a composer. With this strong family background in the Oxford Movement and it’s overlapping cultural principles such as the work of the Pre-Raphaelites, we see a foundation upon which the friendship of Dearmer and VW becomes likely.
[15] des Cars, Laurence. The Pre-Raphaelites: Romance and Realism. Henry N. Abrams, Inc. pg. 23
[16] Ibid. pg. 20
[17] “Now the expression ‘musically correct’ has no meaning; the only ‘correct’ music is that which is beautiful and noble…It is indeed a moral rather than a musical issue. No doubt it requires a certain effort to tune oneself to the moral atmosphere implied by a fine melody; and it is far easier to dwell in the miasma of a languishing and sentimental hymn tunes which so often disfigure our services.” [from RVW’s preface to the English Hymnal pg. ix]
[18] For a discussion of the debt RVW’s outline owed to the Reigate production see Nathaniel Lew’s article in Byron Adams’ and Robin Wells’ Vaughan Williams Essays. Ashgate 2003
[19] Asquith, Clare. Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare. Public Affairs (2005) pgs 23-24 In 1543, Henry VIII forbade actors to interpret scripture or dramatize matters of doctrine.
[20] He even said to his wife Ursula that he had “no intention of subjecting himself to [Parsifal] again.” UVW pg 362
[21] Both Kennedy and Doonan mention leitmotif in one way or another; Kennedy as a an analogy, though Doonan suggests a thorough leitmotivic reading of the opera.
[22] Day pg171
[23] That this system of outside references was conscious seems justified by RVW’s preface to Sir John in Love, wherein he takes pains to dismiss any notion that the folk tunes used in the opera have any symbolic meaning. He does not do likewise with The Pilgrim’s Progress, which utilizes so much external material from his own works.
[24] No. 472 The English Hymnal
[25] Mellers, Wilfrid. Vaughan Williams and the Vision of Albion. Pg131
[26] UVW pg 304
[27] Kung, Hans. On Being a Christian. Pocket Books, New York. 1976 (pg 37)
[28] Kennedy pg. 353
[29] Vocal Score, pg45
[30] cf. Nathaniel Lew’s article on the opera in Vaughan Williams Essays wherein Lew quotes, at length, some of the critics who held this theory, and even seems to agree with them.
[31] Vaughan Williams wrote: “My natural love is more with the Gothic-Teutonic idiom of JS Bach and his predecessors—not ‘Baroque’, by the way… Bach has nothing to do with the mechanical ornament of Baroque architecture, which is much more akin to Beethoven, but should be compared to the natural exfoliation of a Gothic cathedral.” “Some Thoughts On Beethoven’s Choral Symphony” National Music. Pg83
[32] Howes pg. 3
[33] There are many different meanings and interpretations of the word “Romantic”—space unfortunately prevents me from a full discussion here. This present refutation is simply meant to clarify that, philosophically speaking, RVW’s art has little in common with the egocentric Romanticism so commonly found as a foundation of 19th century music.
[34] cited in Lew (ed. Adams) pg191
[35] Indiana University 1980. Doonan’s cataloguing of the thematic materials is invaluable, though he missed some very significant sources and repetitions (especially regarding the Cross icon). His own theory seems to have been that the Pilgrim worked in leitmotivic fashion, and therefore named them as leitmotifs. My own analysis yields different conclusions as to the work’s structure, yet his naming of the thematic material is often very perceptive, and worthy of consultation.
[36] Discussed in Doonan pgs 140-147
[37] pg. 48 full score
[38] see my article “The Pilgrim’s Progress in context: a preliminary study” (Journal of the RVW Society No. 26: February 2003) for a more detailed discussion of the dramatic centrality of this scene to the opera
[39] Thanks to Gregory Martin who pointed out to me that this moment of adoration is directed towards the Cross: it should be staged in this way when produced, so as to make sense of the complex symbolism of the piece.
[40] Kennedy, First Edition, pg 604
[41] This emphasis on Confirmation is interesting for other reasons as well. It has long been asserted that Vaughan Williams was never a “professing” Christian (UVW pg. 29). Yet this is not precisely true: he was confirmed at Charterhouse as an adolescent. This, among other things, was a public profession of faith. Whether one considers this a moment of meaningless ritual or a moment when something real happened, regardless of how faint VW’s faith might have been, is entirely dependant upon one’s theological outlook.
[42] Luke 23:46
[43] National Music. pg 88
[44] Ghezzi, Bert. The Sign of the Cross. Loyola Press. Chicago. 2004. Pg 6. Here, as with my later quotations of St John of the Cross, I would make clear that I am not suggesting Vaughan Williams was directly influenced by the writings of these Saints. I would be very surprised to find he’d read them, in fact. Instead, I am suggesting that certain aspects of his music is best explained in comparison with them—that his experience in some way paralleled theirs, to the extent that what he expressed musically bears a striking resemblance to their theology.
[45] Lew. pg197
[46] Matthew 27:46
[47] St John of the Cross. The Ascent of Mt Carmel. Book I. ICS Publications 1979 pg. 108
[48] pg 167, Vocal Score
[49] Barnstone, Willis, translator. The Poems of St John of the Cross. New Directions, 1972 pg. 39
[50] Kennedy, Works, p356
[51] From New Grove Dictionary of Opera
[52] For a detailed discussion of this issue, see my article “Beyond Wishful Thinking” Journal of the RVW Society, June 2006
[53] Other notable exceptions include Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmelites and Messiaen’s St Francois D’Assise
[54] Kennedy, Works, 357
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