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.

Flos Campi the Enigma

This essay was originally published in the Journal of the RVW Society, No. 42, July 2008. 

The deeper one peers into the life and works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, the more enigmatic they both become. Rarely in the post-romantic world has there been a major composer so reticent about sharing his inspirations, his beliefs, or even his inner life. Before his day it had already become common practice for major composers to be, in a sense, literary men as well. Perhaps the most exaggerated example of this can be found in Richard Wagner, whose writings seem an apotheosis for the 19^th century German Romantic movement. In his typically paradigm-defining manner, Wagner wrote volume after volume detailing his artistic ideology, that his works might be framed within a specific context. This in turn set an example for many of the composers who followed. Tracing the history of European art music since the Romantic period, we find the necessity of a dual discipline emerging—what can be called the composer as critic, or even the composer as the primitive musicologist of his own work. By the mid-twentieth century it had become both commonplace and expected that a prominent composer should publish manifestoes on art in the form of concert notes, articles, or even books. Some used their literary gift as a means of promoting the musical theories behind their works, others as a means of defending themselves against newspaper critics, others still as an almost parallel art form. A fascinating library of works was thus developed over the decades, including books that are interesting almost entirely in their own right, only tangentially related to the music they took as their original raison d’etre. The writings of Erik Satie, Charles Ives’s Essays before a Sonata, Constant Lambert’s Music Ho!, and John Cage’s Silence are but a few examples of the many books that fascinate even on non-musical levels. Gone were the days when major composers were considered mere servants to aristocratic culture. Indeed, the modern world somewhat surprisingly expected composers to be more than mere musicians: it demanded political theorists, sociologists, even seers—very clearly men of the written word as well as the musical score.

It should be noted that this was a relatively recent development before the day of Vaughan Williams. In the century before his birth we cannot even imagine the notion of Mozart writing an extended philosophical text detailing with the implications of The Magic Flute, or propagating a treatise on The Marriage of Figaro which subsequently might have driven him into political exile. Before this, the idea of Bach writing a multiple volume summa on the spiritual and political importance of cantatas and passion settings is unthinkable. Still farther back, the notion that anyone in Tudor England would have considered the theological opinions of William Byrd, in any substantial and serious way, is at least mildly ridiculous.

BEYOND WISHFUL THINKING: A RE-EVALUATION OF VAUGHAN WILLIAMS AND RELIGION

This essay was originally published in The Journal of The RVW Society, No 36, June 2006. 

We had the experience but missed the meaning.

                                                                —T.S. Eliot

I remember once sitting in a graduate seminar, listening to presentations on 20^th century composers, when a very bright student delivered a thirty-minute talk on the Fourth Symphony of Charles Ives. He went into great detail, but the detail was not exclusively about Ives, nor was it primarily about the piece in question. It was primarily about himself: his experience of the piece, his path toward understanding the complex musical material in front of him and, ultimately, his own philosophical and spiritual understanding of life, of which he more or less used the piece as a proof. By the end of the presentation, the other students had certainly learned about Charles Ives and his music, but if they were listening carefully, they learned even more about their classmate.

Regardless of whether or not such a presentation is of value in a purely musicological sense, it is important to note that this method of analysis is no mere student phenomenon. It is in fact a practical rule, albeit tacit, of musicology itself. Most scholars tend to make a strong pretense to objectivity, but a careful reading of standard musical biographies, general histories of music, and articles will demonstrate that the history of music is often used as an ideological battleground, fraught with the agenda of whatever scholar is at hand, rather than as a true discovery of the musician in question, thoughtfully and carefully placed in his or her own day and age. Thus we have a conflicting and even contradictory history of scholarship on any given composer or subject. For example, if we read enough we can learn of the Marxist Beethoven, the Fascist Beethoven, the Freudian Beethoven, or the Feminist deconstruction of Beethoven. Each of them will claim to give us the “true” Beethoven, or at least purport to have placed him properly for the first time. But in each we will also note that some quotations of the composer will have been exaggerated, others will have been suppressed; some important pieces will have been ignored; other, less significant pieces will have been suddenly discovered for the unheralded masterpieces they truly are. To anyone critically following the bias of the scholar, it will become obvious that in many such cases Beethoven is used less as a subject for study than as an object—even to the point of becoming a pawn in what is often a distinctly non-musical game.

All of the great composers have been subjected, over and again, to this sort of analysis. These days, it can sometimes seem as though it is the only analysis that is ever done. But despite all of this, the majority opinion of scholars comes to something like a general agreement on a reasonable position: Bach isn’t regarded as a covert atheist, nor is Beethoven regarded as a proto-Marxist by reasonable scholars, though both claims have been made. Likewise a reasonable consensus exists for most of the major composers in the Classical Canon.

Ralph Vaughan Williams, however, is an exception. He is not considered by the majority of scholars to have been one of the most important composers of his era. Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Ravel, even Shostakovich and Prokofiev tend to overshadow him in general survey texts. Remembered as a primary factor in the English Musical Renaissance of the early 20^th century, he is studied closely only by a handful of scholars, and all too often relegated to a “second tier” of “nationalist” composers (most of whom are considered, rightly or wrongly, to be derivatives of the “greater” composers). Thus Vaughan Williams hasn’t been as hotly debated; fewer ideologues have tried to claim him as their own; fewer hostile scholars have tried to deconstruct him and his work. In one sense this can be good: in so being considered, his life and music have avoided a variety of misreadings. But in another way, this can be very bad, and stunt our understanding of his artistic achievement, particularly if all of the small circle of Vaughan Williams scholars hold one narrow ideology, or reductive outlook, unanimously. Imagining this happening to Beethoven demonstrates how detrimental it might be: if all of the major scholars agreed that he was a proto-Marxist, and every quotation of the great composer running counter to this hypothesis was overlooked, others exaggerated, our deeper understanding of his music would suffer. What would happen to interpretation of the Missa Solemnis? Likewise if Bach criticism was to be dominated by scholars without sufficient background in Christian thought, our understanding of his artistic achievement would be hindered, if not maimed irreparably. And yet this, without exaggerating matters, is analogous to the situation confronting the person who would seek to understand and appreciate the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams.

                   

Since the time of his death, there has been one scholarly opinion regarding the religious beliefs of Ralph Vaughan Williams: it is taken for granted that he was an atheist as a young man, and that he later drifted into agnosticism defined in a narrow and reductive sense, which he held for the rest of his life. Every other opinion, be it Hubert Foss’s flirtation with the word “pantheism” or Byron Adams’s suggestion that RVW used scripture in non-Christian ways, is merely a variation or development on this unanimously assumed theme. Over the last half century, the most frequently cited quotations on the subject have become so officially canonized and engrained that no one, to date, has gone back to look at the strength of the quotes themselves. What was their actual context? Who was the source? Are they being presented in a biased manner, or do they come from a biased source? What was Vaughan Williams actually referring to when he made them? None of these questions have been asked, nor has it been pointed out that the reductive view of Vaughan Williams’s supposed atheism and agnosticism has been hung, for over four decades, on the strength (or weakness) of only a handful of these quotes.

More interesting then this, however, are the quotations ignored, which seem to weaken (or in some cases contradict) the prevalent theory of VW’s beliefs. Finally, the pieces themselves speak very strongly, and only when we are willing to question the assumptions of the major scholars are we able to uncover the true depths of pieces such as the Five Mystical Songs, Sancta Civitas, the Dona Nobis Pacem, and The Pilgrim’s Progress.

The remedy is not so simple as illuminating the depths of pieces, however, as a great deal of dogma has been written about the religious beliefs of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Scholars seemingly without enough knowledge of Christianity, Church history, theology and mysticism have made pronouncements on the subject, buttressing a narrow understanding of VW’s beliefs with a great deal of misinformation, false assumption, and in some cases, misreadings of even the quotes they have thought supported their conclusions. It will therefore take a great deal of unraveling before the situation can be remedied.

Vaughan Williams the atheist?

In his brief overview of the generally prevalent attitudes towards Vaughan Williams’s beliefs, John Barr sensibly opts for a chronological exposition, documenting the major opinions held by scholars at each stage of the composer’s life.1 Beginning, then, with VW’s childhood, Barr points out that the composer was the son of an Anglican clergyman, who died while Ralph was little more than an infant. Significantly, he also mentions that his mother, Margaret Vaughan Williams, was a Christian with “strict evangelical leanings,” though he couldn’t remember exactly where he had read this. It is no surprise that it was difficult to locate the exact source for the quote, as it is not to be found in any of the primary materials a Vaughan Williams scholar might immediately reference for childhood material. Rather, the description of Vaughan Williams's mother as a “strict Christian” comes from Byron Adams’s article, “Scripture, Church and culture: biblical texts in the works of Ralph Vaughan Williams” published in 1996.2

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.

Letters to Malcolm and the Trouble with Narnia

Letters to Malcolm

and the Trouble with Narnia:

C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and their 1949 crisis

Eric Seddon

I

N the early spring of 1949, C.S. Lewis read part of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, still in manuscript, to J.R.R. Tolkien. Expecting enthusiasm from his longtime friend and colleague, he received instead what would remain Tolkien’s permanent dismissal of the work. The assessment was blunt and unequivocal: Tolkien deemed the book almost worthless—a carelessly written jumble of unrelated mythologies. He simply detested it (Sayer 312, 313). Although shaken by this terse and unexpected verdict, Lewis later sought the opinion of Roger Lancelyn Green, whose encouragement lead to the ultimate decision to finish the book (Green & Hooper, 241). It went on to become one of Lewis’s best sellers. The first of what eventually became The Chronicles of Narnia, it has been continuously in print ever since. Now half a century from its first publication, the place of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe seems increasingly remarkable. Like The Lord of the Rings it remains embraced and even celebrated by a society steadily annexed by secular values. Its success both in book sales and, more recently, at the box office have even resulted in the somewhat bizarre spectacle of secular critics writing polemical tracts attempting to marginalize, if not deny, the Christian elements of the plot.[1] Thus Narnia’s success has remained somewhat oddly stunning—the greatest testimony to its place in literature being this steady endurance in the public imagination, despite the societal shifts since its first publication.

Treat It Gentle * The Autobiography of Sidney Bechet

To this day, even the very name of Sidney Bechet evokes intense images and stories. Feisty, explosive, operatic, mellifluous; his blazing, intelligent eyes staring back at us from photos: we know all the stories of his temper and his prodigal career. If Bix Beiderbecke was the prototypically alienated young man with a horn; the distanced aloof genius; Bechet was the first of the unyielding, spiritually restless reedmen who found themselves at odds with the crass commercialism of the music business. His abandonment and intense re engagement of a musical career, multiple times, was to echo through jazz history in the careers of Artie Shaw and Sonny Rollins. Likewise, his expatriation to Europe became the template for later luminaries such as Dexter Gordon and Kenny Dorham.

We know this Bechet: Bechet the misunderstood, under appreciated icon. We also know the Bechet Duke Ellington referred to as the "symbol of jazz", preeminent over even Louis Armstrong as the foundation of jazz itself.

We can listen to all the old recordings, hearing a sound that shakes us internally, sometimes soaring lyrically, sometimes shouting, often pushing the bounds of whatever group he is playing with: Bechet the master; Beethovenian Bechet.

Then there is the Bechet of the mugshot. Bechet the violent, who got in a gun fight at rush hour in Paris. Bechet the deported. This is the Bechet of the Documentary Videos: Bechet of the Ten O'Clock News.

But there is another Bechet to know: a reflective, older Bechet. This is the Sidney Bechet described by Desmond Flower as "warm, wise, kind and gentle." A Bechet whose words rolled like warm poetry, who humbly sought to place his journey in perspective of the music. This is the Sidney Bechet whose wisdom radiates from what might be the finest autobiography of any musician, and an essential work of American literature.

To write a real analysis of Treat it Gentle would require a book length study longer than the brilliant text itself. Some quotes here will have to suffice as an introduction to a work that has the potential to change our understanding of America, jazz, and the nature of music itself. From the very beginning of the book, he sets out to shift our understanding, to give us something (the concept of giving, united to music, is a central aspect of Bechet's philosophy of music). So I'll start there:

You know there's people, they got the wrong idea of Jazz. They think it's all that red-light business. But that's not so. And the real story I've got to tell, it's right there. It's Jazz. What it is--how it come to be what it is.

People come up to me and they ask me 'Are you going to play Tin Roof Blues?' They ask me, 'What's bebop?' or what do I think of some record Louis Armstrong put out. But if I was to answer that, I'd have to go a long way back. [pg. 1]


On what Jazz is:

Bechet was once told by an enthusiastic man in Paris, "This music is your music."

But, you know, no music is my music. It's everybody's who can feel it. You're here...well, if it's music, you feel it--then it's yours too. You've got to be in the sun to feel the sun. It's that way with music too.

The man persisted, however. He wanted to know what would happen when men like Bechet passed on.

..you know, Jazz isn't just me. It isn't just any one person who plays it. There'll always be Jazz. It doesn't stop with me, it doesn't stop anywhere. You take a melody...people can feel a melody...as long as a there's a melody there's Jazz, there's rhythm. [pg 2]

But here's what I really mean. All God's children got a crown. My race, their music...it's their way of giving you something...of showing you how to be happy. It's what they've got to make them happy. The spiritual, that's sad; but there's a way in it that's happy too. We can be told: 'Maybe you don't belong in Heaven, and you haven't got a place on this earth; you're not in our class, our race.' But somewhere, God's children wear a crown, and someday we're going to wear ours too. [pg 3]



On inspiration and the reason to play music:

The real reason you play...it's just because you're able to play, that's all.

Inspiration, that's another thing. The world has to give you that, the way you live in it, what you find in your living. The world gives it to you if you're ready. But it's not just given...it has to be put inside you and you have to be ready to have it put there. All that happens to you makes a feeling out of your life and you play the feeling. But there's more than that. There's the feeling inside the music too. And the final thing, it's the way that life-feeling comes from in you...even if you start playing a number from a love-feeling, it has to become something else before you're through. That love-feeling has to find the music-feeling. And then the music can learn how to get along with itself.

But drinking and reefers and all that stuff, most times they just mess up all the feeling you got inside yourself and all the feeling the music's got inside itself. When a man goes at the music that way, it's just a sign that there's a lot inside himself he don't know how to answer. He's not knowing which way he needs to go. He's not going anywhere at all. [pg 128]


On contracts, the music business, and commercialism:

My answer--all I can say of it--it's just to be giving, giving all you're life, finding the music and giving it away. God maybe punishes a man for wanting too much, but He don't punish a man for giving. Maybe He even fixes it so that what you give away, it's the mostest thing you've got.

And maybe there's another thing why so many of these musicianers ended up so bad. Maybe they didn't know how to keep up with all this commercializing that was happening to ragtime. If it could have stayed where it started and not had to take account of the business it was becoming--all that making contracts and signing options and buying and selling rights--maybe without that it might have been different. If you start taking what's pure in a man and you start putting it on a bill of sale, somehow you can't help destroying it. In a way, all that business makes it so a man don't have anything left to give.

I got a feeling inside me, a kind of memory that wants to sing itself...I can give you that. I can send it out to where it can be taken, maybe, if you want it. I can try to give it to you. But if all I've got is a contract, I've got nothing to give. How'm I going to give you a contract? [pg 124]


 On the Blues:

And it was when I was in jail...that I played the first blues I ever played with a lot of guys singing and no other instruments, just the singing. And, oh my God, what singing that was! It was my first experience that way, hearing someone right next to me start up singing...Got a life so full of punishment, Got me a feeling. Come down Jesus. Oh why don't they put God on this earth where you can find Him easier. Hearing someone else come in after a minute, just hearing his voice in the dark and knowing right away his life has a long way to go. Seeing someone hungry and beat up, seeing his face all bloody and knowing he can't speak your language to tell you what it is, knowing that the only way he has to explain himself is being human, suffering, and waiting....

I'll never forget what those blues did to me. I can't remember every single line, but some I remember. And how it was, the thing it was saying inside itself--I remember that entire. This blues was different from anything I ever heard. Someone's woman left town, or someone's man, he'd gone around to another door...then there was something that took every thought I had out of my mind until it had me so close inside it I could taste how it felt...I was seeing the chains and that gallows, feeling the tears on my own face, rejoicing in the Angel the Lord sent down to that sinner. Oh my God, that was a blues. The way they sang it there, it was something you would send down to earth if it had been given you to be God. What you'd send to your son in trouble if he was on earth and you was in Heaven. [pgs 106-107]

[Both] of them, the spirituals and the blues, they was a prayer. One was praying to God and the other was praying to what's human. It's like one was saying 'Oh God, let me go,' and the other was saying, 'Oh Mister, let me be.' And they were both the same thing in a way; they were both my people's way of praying to be themselves, they had a kind of trance to them, a kind of forgetting. It was like a man closing his eyes so he can see a light inside him. That light, it's far off and you've got to wait to see it. But it's there. It's waiting. The spirituals, they're a way of seeing that light. It's far off music; it's a going away, but it's a going away that takes you with it. And the blues, they've got that sob inside, that awful lonesome feeling. It's got so much remembering inside it, so many bad things to remember, so many losses. [pgs 212-213]

There have been countless books written on the Blues, countless interviews with experts on the matter, but these quotes constitute the best explanation I have ever read or heard in words of what the blues actually do, what they are, how I experience them, and what they're meant for.

I could keep quoting until the whole book was reprinted on this blog...these have only scratched this surface of Bechet's wisdom. Just as Bechet is foundational for jazz clarinet, and jazz itself, I believe his musical philosophy and analysis ought to be treated as a foundational hermeneutic for jazz. 

Treat it Gentle is a book to be returned to, regularly, through the course of one's musical life.