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The pilgrim’s progress

Reviewed by Hubert Foss (MT, June 1951, reprinted in the Summer 2001 issue)

The first night of Vaughan Williams’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’, on Thursday 26 April at Covent Garden was an occasion long to be remembered by those privileged to attend it. Here, unfolded visually and aurally before us, was the product of a lifetime’s devotion, not only to John Bunyan, but to the creation of music. The opening performance and the second too were broadcast. A week later, the writer of any account of it cannot fail to recognize his temporal myopia – what are eight days as a gazebo across a landscape of fifty years’ tillage? One writes in modesty, even after a study of the score, attendance at dress rehearsal and première, and radio listening (score before eyes) on 30 April.

The extraordinary impressiveness of that first night is perhaps the sharpest memory; the audience did not know whether applause would be permissible or plainly irreverent. And this domination of an opera-house audience by the religious intensity of the piece was increased (one observed) by the indubitable, but somehow unnoticed, fact that there is only one character in Vaughan Williams’s work qualified for ‘curtain-calls’: he, too, a man, for there is no mundane lady in the piece of moral integrity or more than theatrical sympathy. Yet there, at the final curtain, was this astonishingly complete work of art – individual yet universal, modern yet traditional, English yet Christian in its trans-frontier emotion. The Cathedral was brought into the theatre but the entertaining architecture of that lovely building was in no sense required to shed its ornament for the stone of gothic. The transformation I witnessed was both spiritual and human.

We must, by authority, accept that the careful and loving production we witnessed was what the composer wished, and tallied in most points with his fore-conceptions. Operatically, ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ sets problems not hitherto faced in any other theatre. All Vaughan Williams’s symphonies (even the last two) have been widely different – some extravagantly so. So, and for many other reasons, it is not surprising that his largest stage-work should be sui generis. The composer disarms his operatic intentions by announcing his work as ‘a morality’, ‘with music by...’.

And here let me interpolate that an anonymous correspondent, certain talkers, more than one colleague- journalist, and others who have conventionally mentioned ‘Parsifal’ as a meed of comparison seem to me to be misunderstanding the German legend, Wagner’s erotic egotism, John Bunyan, the Christian religion, and Vaughan Williams’s modesty of soul, to start with – something of a critical disadvantage to their understanding of the new work, in my submission!

‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ is a stage work, it is not a pageant – how could it be, when the composer has chosen for his literary medium a series of static tableaux? But it is a stage work that needs a very different tradition from that of Covent Garden for its proper realization on the boards. That tradition is very mixed, and under the present Trust has a curious influx of amateurism mingling its new ideas with the worst of the old die-hard habits of the gloomy eighties. To me the production of ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ by Mr. Neville Coghill was grotesquely out of date. I am just old enough to know about the work of Max Reinhardt, nor has the vision of Gordon Craig faded from my semi-senile mind. I shall omit reference as far as possible to Mr. Coghill’s juvenile ineptitudes, for it is not a critic’s place to teach a producer the grammar of stage lighting, of the use of trap-doors and the grouping of chorus. I hope no stage-producer ever ventures into his special field and displays a similar ignorance of the technical elements of the literary craft of Chaucer.

The total effect, I admit (despite the theatrically dropped aitches in the direction), was enormously impressive, though the designer of the scenes helped but little, and the costumes were an unexplained oddity continuing throughout the evening. (Incidentally why was Vanity Fair so darkly scarlet and livid? I wanted, in my character of listener and looker, to be enticed. It was a red, not even a black, market.)

With simpler setting and less elaborate efforts, Vaughan Williams’s music would have had even a better hearing than it did. The chorus sang beautifully and the theatre accepted its rich sounds with a noble amplitude. Arnold Matters had a heavy task, for he had to bear the burden, not only of the entire opera as the one consistent singer, but also of being dressed and undressed often, kneeling, standing, Iying, and staggering around; his part is slow in movement and he comported his less-than- andante with dignity. Edgar Evans, as the Interpreter and later as the Heavenly Messenger, took the stage by singing and deportment better than that of the rest of the company. Bunyan (Ina Te Wiata) was dignified and adequate, even in the last scene when he had to play before red plush tabs and offer us (seemingly) a ‘World’s Classic’ reprint of his great work. I could not (though most of my colleagues could) accept Bryan Drake’s portrait of Watchful, the porter; his enthusiasm was for me spoilt by his odd intonation. Apollyon’s megaphone interested me: Norman Walker sang well but in style recalled Mendelssohn’s Elijah. The pretty music (very welcome) at the opening of act 4 was nicely sung by lris Kells, who could not, under any circumstances of dress, look like a woodcutter’s boy, and was enlivened by Parry Jones and Jean Watson with some genuine if homely humour.

The conductor was a recruit to the officer’s rank, Leonard Hancock, and showed his worth by keeping Vaughan Williams’s music flowing evenly and pleasingly (how beautiful it is!) all through the acts. It was a competent performance, I felt, but not inspiring.

It is pleasing but perhaps unnecessary to add a final paragraph to say that what impressed the audience on that strange and memorable first night was the unconquerable flow, nobility, and spirituality of Vaughan Williams’s music. One would need a pea-shooter (an undignified weapon!) to prink it. He has here given us a generous banquet of his best fare.