Chapter 21 - Theatre, 1895–1914

Summary

Vaughan Williams was much involved, as observer and practitioner, with the theatre of the ‘long’ Edwardian age: less with aspects of that theatre we might first think of now (its WestEnd actor-managers, its nascent New Drama) than with its more broadly popular elements.His interest in music hall and musical comedy is evident near the beginning of the London Symphony. He worked for two seasons at Stratford-upon-Avon as musical director of a non-metropolitan troupe, Frank Benson’s touring Shakespeare company. (Sir John in Love would grow from this.) The age’s taste for pageants saw him compiling scores for an episode in the Crystal Palace’s London Pageant and for a Pilgrim’s Progress spectacular: music that connects with Hugh the Drover and his later Bunyan operas. More esoterically, he wrote music for actual and proposed revivals of Ancient Greek comedy and tragedy, also for a resurrected masque (a form he came to love). And he collaborated, or planned to collaborate, with the two most important English theatrical pioneers of the age: Harley Granville Barker, providing music for symboliste drama at his request, and Edward Gordon Craig, readying himself to work with him on a projected (though abandoned) ballet for Serge Diaghilev.