Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedications
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Musical Examples
- Preface with Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- INTRODUCTION
- 1 Books to Make a Traveller of Thee: Pilgrims, Vagabonds and the Monodramas of Vaughan Williams
- 2 A Quarry for Profitable Working: Staging the Masques of Ben Jonson in London and Stratford-upon-Avon, 1903–1912
- 3 The Edens of Reginald Buckley: Temples and Tetralogies at Bayreuth, Stratford and Glastonbury
- 4 ‘One of the Greatest Composers the World has ever seen’: Vaughan Williams and the Purcell Revival
- 5 ‘What About an English Ballet?’ Edward Gordon Craig, Music-Theatre and Cupid and Psyche
- 6 Alice Shortcake, Jenny Pluckpears and the Stratford-Upon-Avon Connections of Sir John in Love
- 7 Bringing in the May: Alice Gomme, Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams at the Crystal Palace
- 8 Vaughan Williams, the Romany Ryes and the Cambridge Ritualists
- APPENDICES
- SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
- INDEX OF NAMES
- INDEX OF TOPICS
INTRODUCTION
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedications
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Musical Examples
- Preface with Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- INTRODUCTION
- 1 Books to Make a Traveller of Thee: Pilgrims, Vagabonds and the Monodramas of Vaughan Williams
- 2 A Quarry for Profitable Working: Staging the Masques of Ben Jonson in London and Stratford-upon-Avon, 1903–1912
- 3 The Edens of Reginald Buckley: Temples and Tetralogies at Bayreuth, Stratford and Glastonbury
- 4 ‘One of the Greatest Composers the World has ever seen’: Vaughan Williams and the Purcell Revival
- 5 ‘What About an English Ballet?’ Edward Gordon Craig, Music-Theatre and Cupid and Psyche
- 6 Alice Shortcake, Jenny Pluckpears and the Stratford-Upon-Avon Connections of Sir John in Love
- 7 Bringing in the May: Alice Gomme, Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams at the Crystal Palace
- 8 Vaughan Williams, the Romany Ryes and the Cambridge Ritualists
- APPENDICES
- SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
- INDEX OF NAMES
- INDEX OF TOPICS
Summary
On the afternoon of Thursday 15 August 1912, Ralph Vaughan Williams talked to an audience of summer-school students in the Memorial Lecture Room that was part of the handsome and still-surviving scene-dock building close to the old Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon. His subject was traditional folk-music and dance. Intelligent interest in such things, he stressed, was not a matter of backward-looking antiquarianism or an attempt to re-create the past, for (as a journalist from the Birmingham Post reported him as saying) ‘the past was done with; we had to live on in the present and for the future, although we could take from the past whatever had been good in it’.
Those quoted words could serve as epigraph to the eight essays on musical and theatrical arts in early twentieth-century England (detailed case-studies in the main) that I have brought together here. Not that the essays as a group develop a single coherent theme or argument; but in part at least each looks at artistic activity which at one and the same time was characteristic of its age, was concerned in one way or another to point towards the future, and was keen to enlist help from good things in the past so as to do so. The field the essays explore is ‘music-theatre’ in the broad sense of music linked with drama in opera houses and playhouses, recital rooms and concert halls, pageant meadows, public gardens and village greens.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Masques, Mayings and Music-DramasVaughan Williams and the Early Twentieth-Century Stage, pp. 1 - 3Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2014