A Doyen Sums Up

Britain's Ralph Vaughan Williams is a composer who bides his time. Primarily famed as a symphonist (he has composed six symphonies), he waited until he was 51 to write his first ballet score (Old King Cole); at 69 he composed his first film score (49th Parallel). Last week, at 78, the famed old doyen of English composers finally made his first bow in Covent Garden with an opera.

A composer with a lifelong interest in religion, Vaughan Williams had worked for two decades, off & on, at adapting his Pilgrim's Progress from John Bunyan's allegory. His admirers reported that Progress would summarize everything Vaughan Williams has said musically for the past 40 years.

After three churchly hours in Covent Garden last week, most of the audience agreed that summarize it did--even if it added little that was new. In Progress they heard the best and worst of Vaughan Williams, from reedy English pastoral melodies to great splatterings of brass. They gave the composer an ovation, but they also had to agree with one elderly dowager that Progress was "rather monotonous for opera, wasn't it?"

Vaughan Williams himself calls Progress "a morality." He had picked out nine episodes from Bunyan's book, but none of them conveyed much drama or continuity of struggle. The staging was uninspired, and the Pilgrim (sung by Tenor Arnold Matters) wandered from the City of Destruction to Mount Sion like an unruffled country vicar.

London critics were respectful, but deprecatory. The Manchester Guardian complained that Vaughan Williams' Pilgrim "seems in some way outside the music." Most thought that Composer Williams had simply tackled a book, that was too symbolic and subjective for operatic treatment.

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