Religious Meaning and Musical Iconography in Ralph Vaughan Williams’s The Pilgrim’s Progress

The RVW Society now offers a free PDF of the March 2007 journal containing my study of musical iconography in Vaughan Williams's The Pilgrim's Progress. You can read it here.

Ralph Vaughan Williams's The Pilgrim's Progress in Context

a preliminary study
by Eric Seddon

This essay was originally published in the Journal of the RVW Society, No. 26, February 2003; the first in a series reevaluating the religious symbolism and drama in the works of RVW.  

From the time of its premiere at Covent Garden on 26 April 1951,  Ralph Vaughan Williams’s operatic masterpiece, The Pilgrim’s Progress, has been at the very least enigmatic for those who would seek to understand, categorize, support or criticize it. One of the first points of contention usually raised is the question of its suitability for the operatic stage. Its critics point to what they consider to be the static nature of the action, often described as independent tableaux rather than scenes flowing one from another. They point further to the content of those tableaux; suggesting that such noble, religious sentiment ought to be performed in cathedrals rather than opera houses. Finally, they point to the fact that the composer himself referred to the piece as a ‘Morality’ rather than as an ‘opera.’ All of these arguments tend to put the supporters of the piece on the defensive from the outset. One feels that, as a musicologist, one must deliver an apology for the piece rather than focus on its unique qualities. Indeed, to discuss how unique the work is seems dangerous, as it might further alienate the piece from a potential staging. To compound the problem, those of us who recognize the piece’s dramatic qualities, who actually find in it a supremely dramatic statement, often  find ourselves in  the most difficult of positions: trying to prove what to us seems self evident. The temptation even exists to get a bit frustrated with RVW himself for having named the piece a ‘Morality.’ It begins to seem that if he had just named it an ‘opera’ in the first place, he’d have saved us all a lot of trouble in trying to get it staged.

            This temptation, though, is better off ignored. The fact is that in designating the piece a “Morality,” the composer was illuminating the sub-genre of the piece rather than obscuring it, and that such a designation does not at all separate it from the general canon of operatic compositions. Thus,  instead of defending the piece by a discussion, primarily, of  its interior virtues in an isolated fashion, this article aims to do something slightly different: to place The Pilgrim’s Progress in the context of Vaughan Williams’s thought and in the context of the 20th century, and to compare and contrast the opera’s achievement with it’s most similar contemporaries. Two other composers’ operas in particular, produced in the same decade, will help to illuminate the unique, but necessarily operatic place in musical history The Pilgrim’s Progress occupies.

           

            During the 1950’s three major composers, none of them particularly known for operatic endeavors, each produced masterpieces for the stage. In September of 1951 Igor Stravinsky, who had long wanted to write an English language opera, produced The Rake’s Progress, an opera in the form of a “moral fable” based upon Hogarth’s 18th century paintings, with text by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman. Earlier in the same year, as part of the Festival of Britain, Ralph Vaughan Williams produced the results of four and a half decades of work when The Pilgrim’s Progress was staged at Covent Garden. The third of this interesting operatic triptych, Poulenc’s Dialogue des Carmelites, was produced in Milan’s famed La Scala in 1957. It was based on the true story of the execution of 16 Carmelite nuns during the French Revolution.