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Dramatic Applications of Folksong in Vaughan Williams's Operas Hugh the Drover and Sir John in Love

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Eric Saylor
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Abstract

Although Ralph Vaughan Williams's operas Hugh the Drover (1924) and Sir John in Love (1929) both prominently feature English folk and traditional tunes, the dramatic ends such music serves differ significantly between the two works. This article compares the ways in which Vaughan Williams uses folk music in both operas, with the larger aim of providing a more nuanced perspective on the changing musical and dramatic potential the composer saw for indigenous English music within the context of opera.77

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 134 , Issue 1 , 2009 , pp. 37 - 83
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Musical Association

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References

1 Nicholas Temperley, ‘Musical Nationalism in English Romantic Opera’, The Lost Chord: Essays on Victorian Music, ed. Nicholas Temperley (Bloomington, IN, 1989), 143–57 (p. 144). There is a striking parallel between Temperley's stages of development and Liah Greenfield's nation-orientated interpretation of the Nietzschean concept of ressentiment. In short, Greenfield claims that national competition is spurred primarily by envy; that is, a given subject nation will aspire to achieve or possess what another nation already has, even though such replication is ultimately unattainable. Nonetheless, ressentiment can inspire powerful creative responses to the object of desire that result in new and distinctive forms of art, even though ‘the new system of values that emerges is necessarily influenced by the one to which it is a reaction’. See Liah Greenfield, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 15–17.

2 See, for example, Cecil Sharp, English Folk Song: Some Conclusions (4th edn, London, 1965; repr. Wakefield, 1971), xix–xxii.

3 For brief synopses of these figures’ activities, see Michael Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams (2nd edn, Oxford, 1980; repr. 1995), 23–30; also Frank Kidson and Mary Neal, English Folk-Song and Dance (Cambridge, 1915; repr. Totowa, NJ, 1972), 40–7. More extensive accounts (including the application of the term ‘folksong’) may be found in Ian Russell, ‘England (i), §II’, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell, 29 vols. (2nd edn, London, 2001), viii, 228–39; also Georgina Boyes, The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology, and the English Folk Revival (Manchester, 1993).

4 One of the Society's most important aims was to transcribe the melodies they collected as faithfully as possible from singers’ performances, a practice Vaughan Williams compared favourably with those used in collecting Welsh, Scottish and Irish folksongs in the early nineteenth century. ‘Nowadays a new spirit animates the collector; he wishes to preserve and put before the public exactly what he has heard – neither more nor less – and we can be sure that whatever we find in the collections of modern investigators is an accurate transcript of the songs of traditional singers.’ Ralph Vaughan Williams, English Folk-Songs (London, 1912), 4, quoted in idem, ‘English Folk-Songs’, Vaughan Williams on Music, ed. David Manning (Oxford, 2008), 185–200 (p. 187). Julian Onderdonk has shown, however, that although EFSS collectors did not engage in the kind of drastic reworking of mode or melody that characterized much folksong collecting from the early nineteenth century, some would occasionally make minor alterations to clarify a song's design – for example, altering the rhythmic value or pitch of a note in one phrase to match an otherwise identical phrase elsewhere in the song. Julian Onderdonk, ‘Vaughan Williams's Folksong Transcriptions: A Case of Idealization?’, Vaughan Williams Studies, ed. Alain Frogley (Cambridge, 1996), 118–38.

5 See Cecil Sharp, English Folk Song: Some Conclusions (4th edn), 1–2, 161–80.

6 This practice runs parallel with other invented traditions associated with nineteenth- and twentieth-century England; see The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge, 1983; repr. 1992, 1999); and Alun Howkins, ‘The Discovery of Rural England’, Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920, ed. Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (London, 1986), 62–88. A slightly broader take (that is, as related to Britishness rather than Englishness) can be found in Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT, 1992).

7 See William Johnson Galloway, The Operatic Problem (London, 1902), esp. pp. 3–18 and 47–80 passim.

8 Charles Villiers Stanford, ‘The Case for National Opera’, Studies and Memories (London, 1908), 3–23; and Cecil Forsyth, Music and Nationalism: A Study of English Opera (London, 1911). Further articulations of this point in the more popularly orientated musical press may be found in Charles Maclean, ‘Music in England’, Zeitschrift der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft, 1 (1899), 9–25, esp. pp. 9–12; unsigned, ‘Incorporated Society of Musicians’, Musical Times, 52 (1911), 104–13 (p. 113); and ‘Common Time’ (pseud.), ‘Musical Gossip of the Month’, Musical Opinion and Music Trade Review, 25/293 (February 1902), 350–1.

9 Richard A. Streatfeild, The Opera: A Sketch of the Development of Opera (London, 1897), 306–23 (pp. 322–3).

10 J. A. Fuller-Maitland, English Music in the XIXth Century (New York, 1902; repr. Portland, ME, 1976), 237–49, esp. pp. 244–9.

11 Eric Walter White, The Rise of English Opera (New York, 1951), 258–64. Additionally, composers who desired to attain performances of their operas during the regular season at Covent Garden could translate their English libretti into Italian, German or French, thus conforming to conventions in place at the Royal Opera House before the twentieth century.

12 Vaughan Williams's classification of Hugh as a ‘Romantic ballad opera’ was the first of many such qualifications he made with regard to his own operas, including The Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains (‘pastoral episode’), The Poisoned Kiss (‘Romantic extravaganza’) and The Pilgrim's Progress (‘morality’). It also immediately establishes a connection with English ballad opera, although in practice this relates more to the dramatic tone than to the vocal treatment. For more on the links between Hugh and the ballad-opera tradition, see Eric Saylor, ‘The Significance of Nation in the Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 2003), 73–6; also Roger Savage, ‘Alice Shortcake, Jenny Pluckpears, and the Stratford-upon-Avon Connections of Vaughan Williams's “Sir John in Love”’, Music and Letters, 89 (2008), 18–55 (pp. 40–3).

13 For a full list of the songs and variants Vaughan Williams collected, as well as their places of origin, see Michael Kennedy, Catalogue of the Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams (2nd edn, London, 1996), 245–81; and Folk Songs Collected by Ralph Vaughan Williams, ed. Roy Palmer (London, 1983).

14 Ralph Vaughan Williams, ‘Some Conclusions’ (1934), National Music and Other Essays (2nd edn, Oxford, 1987), 62–73 (p. 68).

15 Vaughan Williams said as much when recalling his friendship with fellow composer George Butterworth: ‘To him, as to me, the folk-song was not an inhibiting but a liberating influence; it certainly helped Butterworth to realize himself and to cast off the fetters of Teutonism.’ Ralph Vaughan Williams, ‘A Musical Autobiography’, National Music and Other Essays, 177–94 (p. 193).

16 See particularly Philip Bohlman, ‘Landscape – Region – Nation – Reich: German Folk Song in the Nexus of National Identity’, Music and German National Identity, ed. Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter (Chicago, IL, 2002), 105–27, which deals with the pioneering work of German writer and philosopher Johann Herder on this subject; also Richard Taruskin, ‘N. A. Lvov and the Folk’, Defining Russia Musically (Princeton, NJ, 1997), 3–24; Marina Frolova-Walker, ‘“National in Form, Socialist in Content”: Musical Nation-Building in the Soviet Republics’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 51 (1998), 331–71; and Daniel M. Grimley, Grieg: Music, Landscape, and Norwegian Identity (Woodbridge, 2006), 11–54. Vaughan Williams frequently invoked the historical and cultural significance of folksong in his lectures and essays. See particularly his series of lectures delivered at Bryn Mawr College in 1932 and published as ‘National Music’ in 1934 (see Vaughan Williams, National Music and Other Essays, 1–82, passim); also ‘The Folk-Song Movement’, ibid., 234–6. A parallel stream of thought can also be found in Béla Bartók's essays ‘The Influence of Peasant Music on Modern Music’ and ‘On Modern Music in Hungary’, Béla Bartók Essays, ed. Benjamin Suchoff (Lincoln, NE, 1976; repr. 1992), 340–4, 474–8.

17 Ralph Vaughan Williams, ‘Gustav Holst: An Essay and a Note’ (1920), National Music and Other Essays, 129–53 (p. 142).

19 Ralph Vaughan Williams, ‘A School of English Music’, Vocalist, 1 (1902), 8.

18 Ralph Vaughan Williams, ‘English Folk Song’, Musical Times, 52 (1911), 101–4 (p. 104). The composer made many similar comments to this effect, such as: ‘The English composer will not make his music good by covering his own art with the shell of Brahms’ Teutonism, Tchaikovsky's Slavism, or Debussy's Gallicism, and forgetting about the kernel’; see Ralph Vaughan Williams, ‘The Foundations of a National Art’, Music Student, 7 (1914–15), 5–7, quoted in idem, ‘British Music’, Vaughan Williams on Music, ed. Manning, 43–56 (p. 44); see also Vaughan Williams, English Folk-Songs, 15, quoted in idem, ‘English Folk-Songs’, Vaughan Williams on Music, ed. Manning, 198–9.

20 Byron Adams, ‘“By Season Season'd”: Shakespeare and Vaughan Williams’, John Donne Journal, 25 (2006), 183–97 (pp. 191–2). Still, there are several smaller-scale or lesser-known pieces from the 1920s and 30s that feature folk (or folk-derived) material prominently, including the ballet Old King Cole (1923), the English Folk Song Suite for military band (1923; arranged for orchestra in 1924), the masque On Christmas Night (1926), the oft-arranged Six Studies in English Folk Song (1926), the unpublished Fantasia on Sussex Folk Tunes for cello and orchestra (completed 1929), the orchestral work The Running Set (1934) and music for The Pageant of Abinger (1934), among others.

21 ‘The centuries which produced John Dunstable, acknowledged by his contemporaries to be the greatest musician of his time, was [sic] also the time when the English were pre-eminent by their partiality for “carolling”. In the golden age of the English madrigalists it was possible for Morley to picture the musical amateur who was ashamed because he could not read his music at sight when the part-books were given round after supper. The age of Purcell was also the time of the innumerable editions of The Dancing Master.’ Vaughan Williams, ‘The Foundations of a National Art’, 7, quoted in ‘British Music’, Vaughan Williams on Music, ed. Manning, 46.

23 Ursula Vaughan Williams, R.V.W.: A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams (London, 1964), 402. For more on Child's remarkable and eclectic career as a writer and critic – during which he produced such wide-ranging texts as a guide to the staging of Hamlet, a travel handbook for the Channel Islands, a collection of love poetry and a translation of Louis Dimier's French Painting in the Sixteenth Century – see S. C. Roberts's memoir in Harold Child, Essays and Reflections (Cambridge, 1948), vii–xii.

22 In 1905, he and Gustav Holst collaborated on the music for Ben Jonson's masque Pan's Anniversary, performed for the Shakespeare birthday celebrations at Stratford-upon-Avon that year. Vaughan Williams also wrote incidental music for two plays: a dramatized version of John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress produced and staged at Reigate Priory in 1906, and a production of Aristophanes’ The Wasps performed as part of the Cambridge Greek Play series of 1909. Although Hugh was the first opera Vaughan Williams wrote, it was the second to be performed; The Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains, a one-act ‘pastoral episode’ drawn from The Pilgrim's Progress, had its première in 1922.

25 Ralph Vaughan Williams, ‘Nationalism and Internationalism’ (1942), National Music and Other Essays, 153–9 (p. 157). Much more information on the complicated and often frustrating history of anglophone opera in England may be found in Eric Walter White, A History of English Opera (London, 1983), 372–86, and Frances Donaldson, The Royal Opera House in the Twentieth Century (London, 1988), 8–22.

24 See Forsyth, Music and Nationalism, 127. Forsyth was a fellow student of Vaughan Williams's at the RCM and the author of a noted text on orchestration, a subject on which Vaughan Williams turned to him often for advice prior to the First World War. Given their shared educational and cultural background, it is reasonable to assume their sympathy extended to matters related to music's role within the nation's culture; see Roger Savage, ‘Vaughan Williams Brings in the May: Sydenham, 1911’, Journal of the RVW Society, 28 (2003), 12–17 (p. 13); also Vaughan Williams, ‘A Musical Autobiography’, 186.

30 Colles, ‘Hugh the Drover’. See also Ernest Newman, ‘This Week's Music’, Sunday Times (20 July 1924), sec. 1, 7; and Sackville-West, ‘Hugh the Drover’.

26 A more comprehensive summary can be found in Ralph Vaughan Williams, Hugh the Drover, vocal score (rev. edn, 1956), libretto by Harold Child (London, 1977), viii–ix. The opera underwent many revisions in later years. Several significant modifications and cuts were made, including the transfer of a love duet between Hugh and Mary from their scene in the stocks to the finale, the elimination of a passage near the end where Hugh criticizes village life (after having been asked to stay on), minor alterations to the text, and the removal of several small passages of music. Vaughan Williams added an extra scene at the beginning of Act 2 for a 1933 revival, but later withdrew it. All references and citations are to the definitive version of 1956 unless otherwise noted. See also Frank Howes, The Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams (London, 1954), 253, 262; Kennedy, Catalogue, 98–103; and Vaughan Williams, Hugh the Drover, xi.

27 See H. C. Colles, ‘Hugh the Drover’, The Times (15 July 1924), sec. 1, 12; idem, ‘Opera in London’, Musical Times, 65 (1924), 744–5; ‘Figaro’ (pseud.), ‘The Operatic World’, Musical Opinion, 47/564 (September 1924), 1176–7; and Percy Scholes, ‘Music of the Week’, Observer (20 July 1924), 10.

28 Unsigned, ‘Hugh the Drover’, Daily Telegraph (15 July 1924), sec. 1, 16.

29 Edward Sackville-West, ‘Hugh the Drover’, Spectator (10 July 1924), 90–1.

31 Hubert Foss, Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Study (London, 1950), 177.

32 Newman, ‘This Week's Music’.

33 An advertisement by Curwen for selections from Hugh appeared in Opera and the Ballet, 2 (1924), 37, promoting songs from the opera at two shillings for individual tunes and four shillings for small collections of songs and choruses.

35 Ibid., 402; see also Percy Scholes, ‘Music and Musicians: Hugh the Drover’, Observer (13 July 1924), 10. It is also worth noting that Smetana's opera and Hugh are both set on the eve of a May Day Festival, which – given the degree to which Vaughan Williams saw Smetana's work as a template for a ‘real English opera’ – is probably no coincidence. Strikingly, the Interlude from the ‘Prologue, Episode and Interlude’ that Vaughan Williams completed in 1933 as an addendum to Sir John in Love also makes brief reference to Maying activities in the text for the women's chorus; see Savage, ‘Alice Shortcake, Jenny Pluckpears’, 40.

36 Scholes, ‘Music of the Week’, 10. Scholes's wry observation alludes to a debate regarding the ‘national’ credentials of Arthur Sullivan, and whether his music – and what kinds – would be appropriate to adopt as a model for a school of distinctively English music; for a more detailed exploration of this question, see Charles Maclean, ‘Sullivan as a National Style-Builder’, Proceedings of the Musical Association, 28 (1901–2), 89–104.

34 This position is bolstered by a comment in one letter: ‘Could you come here one day soon and have a long talk over the opera – the 2nd Act is getting entirely out of hand – its [sic] grand opera of the worst description.’ U. Vaughan Williams, R.V.W., 412; the emphasis is original.

37 Vaughan Williams attributed the street cries ‘Cockles’ and ‘Toy Lambs’ to Frank Kidson, who originally published them (Frank Kidson, ‘Musical Street Cries’, Journal of the Folk-Song Society, 4/15 (1910), 104–5), although Vaughan Williams's arrangement of ‘Cockles’ differs from Kidson's. ‘Primroses’ was first collected as ‘Primrose-selling Man's Cry’ by Lucy Broadwood in 1898, but not published until 1910 (Lucy Broadwood, ‘Street Cries: London Cries’, Journal of the Folk-Song Society, 4/15 (1910), 97–102 (p. 100)); a similar tune, ‘Lavender Cry’, appears in the second movement of A London Symphony, written concurrently with Hugh. Ursula Vaughan Williams claimed that the tunes for ‘Primroses’ and ‘Lavender Cry’ were identical, and that the flower name was changed to primroses because of the spring setting for Hugh (U. Vaughan Williams, R.V.W., 400); but the publication of Broadwood's version of the ‘Primrose Cry’ – identical note for note – indicates otherwise.

38 Vaughan Williams collected several variants of ‘Maria Martin’ and wrote about its connection to ‘Dives and Lazarus’ (‘Carols’, Journal of the Folk-Song Society, 2/7 (1905), 115–39 (pp. 118–19)). ‘Tuesday Morning’ is also known as ‘At the Sign of the Bonny Blue Bell’. Vaughan Williams collected a version of ‘Tuesday Morning’ in 1904, but the version used in Hugh is nearly identical to one collected by Frank Kidson in 1903 (‘At the Sign of the Bonny Blue Bell’, Journal of the Folk-Song Society, 2/6 (1905), 51–3 (p. 51)) that Vaughan Williams would doubtless have seen.

39 The words to the Morris Dance Tune come from a Cheshire Morris dance that Sharp credited to William Barclay Squire (William Barclay Squire, ‘Morris Dance’, Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. George Grove, 5 vols. (London, 1880), ii, 369), though the tunes differ. Frank Howes identified the tune used in Hugh as a Morris Processional set against a jig in triple time (Howes, The Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, 258). Vaughan Williams collected John's ‘May Song’ in 1907, but a version also appears in Lucy Broadwood and J. A. Fuller-Maitland, English County Songs (London, 1893), 98–9 (see also Kennedy, Catalogue, 266, and Folk Songs, ed. Palmer, 6–7). Vaughan Williams credited the ‘May Day Carol’ to Lucy Broadwood (Broadwood and Fuller-Maitland, op. cit., 108–9), though Vaughan Williams used a different text for the first verse.

40 As noted in Constant Lambert, Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline (2nd edn, New York, 1967), 141.

41 While this term (and its opposite, extra-diegetic or non-diegetic) is most commonly used in association with film music, literature addressing its use in opera has grown significantly over the last two decades. Some of the most influential writing in this field stems from Carolyn Abbate's discussion of ‘phenomenal’ and ‘noumenal’ sound (in Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ, 1991)) along with responses to her by Richard Taruskin (‘She Do the Ring in Different Voices’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 4 (1992), 187–97) and Gary Tomlinson (Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (Princeton, NJ, 1999), 83–103). In her own writing, Abbate uses the term ‘diegetic’ in the sense of telling a story as opposed to the ‘mimetic’ sense of enacting it, but her approach to the concepts of ‘phenomenal’ and ‘noumenal’ sound corresponds with the definitions of diegetic and extra-diegetic advanced in this article.

42 Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song, 90–1.

43 Ralph Vaughan Williams, London, to Harold Child, summer 1910; quoted in U. Vaughan Williams, R.V.W., 405.

44 See, for example, Kidson and Neal, English Folk-Song and Dance, 4–6, 37–8, 54.

45 U. Vaughan Williams, R.V.W., 401.

46 Roger Savage, ‘Vaughan Williams, The Romany Ryes, and the Cambridge Ritualists’, Music and Letters, 83 (2002), 383–418 (p. 396); for more on this contextualization of Hugh, see ibid., 391–406 passim; for a summary of the ritual layout and archetypes involved in mumming, see Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and their World (Cambridge, 1997), 41–4. Stravinsky also briefly addresses the notion of ‘ritual for ritual's sake’ rather than for a coherent dramatic end in describing his own Les noces; see Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Expositions and Developments (London, 1962), 114–17.

47 See Savage, ‘Vaughan Williams Brings in the May’, 15.

50 Ralph Vaughan Williams, ‘Verdi – A Symposium’, The Opera Bedside Book, ed. Harold Rosenthal (London, 1965), 195–6 (p. 196).

48 Ralph Vaughan Williams, Sir John in Love, vocal score (rev. edn), libretto by William Shakespeare and Ralph Vaughan Williams (London, 1971), vii.

49 Ralph Vaughan Williams, London, to Michael Kennedy, Manchester, 1 July 1956, quoted in Letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams 1895–1958, ed. Hugh Cobbe (Oxford, 2008), 587.

51 Vaughan Williams eliminated the play's episode with the old woman of Brentford and the tutoring session between Evans and William Page, but, unlike Boito, retained singing parts for Nym, Shallow, Slender and the Host of the Garter, along with the subplot of the duel between Caius and Evans. (For a more complete summary, see Saylor, ‘The Significance of Nation’, 90–3.) Vaughan Williams declined to use Falstaff's monologue on honour from Henry IV, Part 1 that Verdi included in Falstaff, but did include a drinking song from Henry IV, Part 2, as well as songs from Love's Labour's Lost and Much Ado About Nothing. Texts from Tudor and Jacobean poetry (by Sir Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson and Thomas Campion, among others) were also used, and were either substituted for Shakespeare's lines or interspersed between them, often in ensemble scenes. A full list of the interpolated material, including the titles and authors of original sources and its position within the opera, may be found in Kennedy, Catalogue, 122–4. One citation, however, is absent: that for ‘A Cup of Wine’, from Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1, Act 5, scene iii. Further information on the origins and use of these sources may be found in Howes, The Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, 275–98; also Savage, ‘Alice Shortcake, Jenny Pluckpears’, 30–2, esp. note 34.

52 See note 12 above.

53 Vaughan Williams, Sir John in Love, vii. The emphasis is original.

54 Savage, ‘Alice Shortcake, Jenny Pluckpears’, 44.

55 The first tune is also known as ‘A Sailor Courted a Farmer's Daughter’, which Vaughan Williams collected himself (‘A Sailor Courted a Farmer's Daughter’, Journal of the Folk-Song Society, 3/13 (June 1909), 294–5 (p. 294)); his source for the second tune is unclear, but he did not collect a version of it.

56 The full name of the song, which was collected in 1906 by H. E. D. Hammond (‘Conventional Ballads’, Journal of the Folk-Song Society, 3/11 (1907), 61–76 (p. 61)), is ‘Robin Hood and the Bishop of Hereford’.

57 Vaughan Williams first collected this tune in 1908 (Ralph Vaughan Williams et al., ‘Songs from Norfolk’, Journal of the Folk-Song Society, 4/15 (December 1910), 84–91 (p. 90); see also Ralph Vaughan Williams and George Butterworth, ‘Lovely Joan’, ibid., 4/17 (January 1913), 330). Roy Palmer has noted that in the first line (‘A noble knight there was indeed’) the phrase ‘fine young man’ was sometimes substituted for ‘noble knight’, but the latter seems to be most common (Folk Songs, ed. Palmer, 127).

58 See Howes, The Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, 290. In keeping with the tune's original function, Vaughan Williams included steps in the score for a stylized dance to accompany the music, though not one that imitated the movements associated with the sword dance: ‘Ford starts searching the house. The others, including men and women servants of the house, follow in single file. Whenever Ford comes to a likely place he steps back in order to examine it. The others conform, so that gradually a sort of dance evolves – 24 steps forward then 3 steps forward and 3 steps back, then 6 steps forward, 3 steps back and 6 steps forward (the steps back on the long accented notes of the tune). Ford goes immediately off stage, but the procession is so long that the tail and head join together – when Ford reappears on the other side of the stage. After this they all dance off stage.’ Vaughan Williams, Sir John in Love, 212.

59 This jig-like tune was first published in John Playford's Dancing Master of 1650 and, as with ‘T'Old Wife o’ Dallowgill’, Vaughan Williams included choreographic instructions with this song, though in more technical language; see Sir John in Love, 308.

60 Songs of this sort in Sir John include ‘Back and Side Go Bare’ (ibid., 59–63), ‘When Daisies Pied’ (ibid., 90–4), ‘Sigh No More Ladies’ (ibid., 107–14) and ‘A Cup of Wine’ (ibid., 119–20). One other folk-like tune, ‘I Mun be Married a-Sunday’, can be found in Ralph Vaughan Williams, Prologue, Episode and Interlude from the Opera Sir John in Love, vocal score (London, 1936), 51.

61 Vaughan Williams, ‘The Evolution of the Folk-Song (2)’, National Music and Other Essays, 40–52 (pp. 46–7).

62 See Howkins, ‘The Discovery of Rural England’, 77–8.

63 See Hammond, ‘Conventional Ballads’, 61–2.

64 He spent part of 1913 writing incidental music for Frank Benson's Shakespeare performances at Stratford-upon-Avon. Among the works produced that season were The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry IV, Part 2, two of the three plays featuring Falstaff. Little of the music written for these productions survives, but what remains shows that Vaughan Williams made an arrangement of ‘Greensleeves’ for a performance of Richard II that was re-used in Merry Wives (Kennedy, Catalogue, 78–9). Much more on the composer's activities with Benson and the Bensonians may be found in Savage, ‘Alice Shortcake, Jenny Pluckpears’, 18–30.

65 The stage instructions read: ‘Mrs. Ford arranges herself in a seductive attitude on the couch and takes her lute and begins thrumming it.’ Vaughan Williams, Sir John in Love, 194.

66 ‘You are not young, no more am I / go to then, there's sympathy. You are merry, so am I / then there's more sympathy. You love sack and so do I / would you desire better sympathy?’ See Sir John in Love, 100–4, for the full text of the letter.

67 Interestingly, both this tune and ‘Lovely Joan’ return as instrumental interludes: ‘Lovely Joan’ recurs between the first and second scenes of Act 2, and ‘Greensleeves’ just prior to Act 4, scene ii. The return of ‘Greensleeves’ is particularly appropriate, since scene i of that act opens with Ford asking his wife's forgiveness for his accusations of ‘wantonness’, and closes with the instrumental evocation of the song's opening line (‘Alas my love, you do me wrong …’). It is also worth noting that Vaughan Williams later united these two interludes as the Fantasia on ‘Greensleeves’ (1934), which has gone on to be one of his most popular works.

68 See Kennedy, Catalogue, 121; and Howes, The Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, 286.

69 F.B., ‘A New English Opera’, Daily Telegraph (23 March 1929), sec. 1.

70 See Vaughan Williams, Sir John in Love, 130, 157, 292.

71 Ibid., 95–7, 103–4, 246, 254–5.

72 An analogous example occurs in Act 1, during Dr Caius's first scene. Caius has a distinctive signature tune in 6/8 time that recurs throughout the opera. When he discovers that Mrs Quickly has been hiding Slender's servant, he flies into a rage; as he does so, his signature tune reappears in double time and in 4/4 metre (ibid., 38, 43). Coincidentally, Vaughan Williams wrote about exactly this type of metric transformation in a Morris dance tune based on ‘Greensleeves’ only a few years before he began work on Sir John in Love; see Ralph Vaughan Williams, ‘Dance Tunes’, Vaughan Williams on Music, ed. Manning, 205–13 (pp. 207–9).

73 In an article he had published in 1914 on British music in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Vaughan Williams referred to The Beggar's Opera as ‘what we should nowadays call a “musical comedy”, and what the Germans call “sing-spiel”. That is a spoken comedy interspersed with songs.’ Ralph Vaughan Williams, ‘British Music in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, Music Student, 7 (1914–15), 63–4 (p. 64), quoted in idem, ‘British Music’, Vaughan Williams on Music, ed. Manning, 55–6.

75 David Russell Hume and Arthur Jacobs, ‘London’, The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie, 4 vols. (London, 1992), iii, 2–41 (p. 14).

75 Roger Savage also suggests that The Beggar's Opera could have played a role in inspiring Vaughan Williams to adapt Shakespeare's Merry Wives for what would become Sir John in Love; see Savage, ‘Alice Shortcake, Jenny Pluckpears’, 42, esp. note 60.

77 Vaughan Williams, ‘Nationalism and Internationalism’, 155.

77 Examples 1–4 are from Hugh the Drover Music by Ralph Vaughan Williams Libretto by Harold Child Music © Copyright 1920 by Joan Ursula Penton Vaughan Williams. All rights for the United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Jamaica and South Africa exclusively licensed to Faber Music Limited. All rights for the World (Ex United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Jamaica and South Africa) exclusively licensed to J. Curwen & Sons Limited and then transferred to G. Schirmer Limited. Libretto © Copyright 1920 by Harold Child. All rights for the World exclusively licensed to J. Curwen & Sons Limited and then transferred to G. Schirmer Limited. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Reprinted by Permission. Examples 5–16 are from Sir John in Love An Opera in Four Acts R. Vaughan Williams © Oxford University Press 1930. Corrected edition published 1971. Used by permission. All rights reserved.