In summer season 2004, the Glastonbury Competition raised eyebrows when, alongside headline acts equivalent to Paul McCartney, Muse and Oasis, it additionally staged English Nationwide Opera’s manufacturing of Wagner’s The Valkyrie. The unlikely efficiency went down a deal with, although what number of of these current realised it was really echoing one other, earlier Glastonbury – one which was simply as charismatic?
Who had been Buckley and Boughton, the founders of the unique Glastonbury Competition?
The unique Glastonbury competition was largely the creation of 1 outstanding man, now virtually forgotten. The composer Rutland Boughton usually resembled his hero Richard Wagner: a small, spare, dynamic man, idealistic, unconventional, charming, but additionally self-centred, smug and contentious, and with an much more advanced love-life. He might need fitted into the brand new competition’s unique hippie ethos very properly.
Sheer pure expertise and drive had already introduced him far. The son of an Aylesbury grocer with no musical background, he was despatched to the Royal Faculty of Music by aristocratic patrons, alongside Holst, Vaughan Williams and others. Ultimately he grew to become accompanist to the good Welsh baritone David Ffrancon-Davies and tutor to his daughter Gwen, and in 1905 the influential composer Granville Bantock provided him a submit on the Birmingham Institute of Music.
With Reginald Buckley, an aspiring poet, Boughton produced a cheekily Wagnerian manifesto, Music Drama of the Future. Each had been romantic Socialists, younger intellectuals excited by modern tendencies, Buckley by George Bernard Shaw’s and Marie Stopes’s pursuits in sexual liberation and, much less fortunately, human eugenics. Collectively they proposed constructing a competition theatre alongside Bayreuth traces, which might stage Boughton’s personal music-drama cycle about King Arthur, to Buckley’s libretti. It was a modern ambition amongst composers, however Boughton and Buckley had the willpower and the contacts to launch the venture. At first they thought-about the socially experimental Letchworth Backyard Metropolis, however then an acquaintance talked about Glastonbury.
Why Glastonbury?
This enticing little Somerset city, with its excessive inexperienced Tor and the paranormal atmosphere which makes it a contemporary ‘New Age’ capital, caught Boughton’s creativeness. Legend claims that Joseph of Arimathea and even Jesus Christ himself visited right here. Appropriately, Eleventh-century monks claimed to have discovered King Arthur’s grave ‘within the island of Avalon’. It appeared ideally suited for Boughton’s dream of a competition primarily based on a communal farm, labored by the artists.
Boughton boldly give up his submit, and in 1912 he and Buckley approached the city’s slightly baffled residents. Gentle Edwardian misgivings had been aroused: after his unstable spouse refused a divorce, Boughton was now dwelling with the gifted artist Christina Walshe, who grew to become the Competition’s third shifting spirit. Nevertheless, an imposing listing of inventive celebrities provided ethical and monetary help, together with Holst, Parry, Vaughan Williams, Grainger, John Galsworthy, Henry Wooden and Gordon Craig – virtually everybody who was anybody, actually, together with Shaw, with whom Boughton loved an amiably vituperative correspondence. Elgar promised to put the brand new theatre’s basis stone. However although funds had been raised, even with the First World Struggle looming, there wasn’t sufficient to construct. The three cast forward nonetheless, eagerly involving locals alongside skilled artists, each enhancing their populist imaginative and prescient and saving cash.
When was the primary Glastonbury Competition?
In August 1914 they launched the primary competition programme, providing performs, ballets, kids’s operas and live shows, however solely excerpts from the uncompleted Arthurian operas. As a substitute, Boughton premiered what would show his most vital music-drama, The Immortal Hour. Missing the theatre, they held performances in Glastonbury’s small Meeting Rooms, with a grand piano as an alternative of an orchestra and a refrain and employees drawn principally from locals. Walshe designed hanging costumes however, unable to afford units, she created an idea which attracted widespread consideration, utilizing the refrain as ‘dwelling surroundings’, miming and dancing photos equivalent to waves breaking on citadel partitions. Regardless of hitches – not least Boughton’s affair with Irene Lemon, singing the heroine Etain, and having to exchange one singer himself – the Competition was a hit.
Over the following few years, regardless of warfare constraints and everlasting fundraising, an much more formidable programme developed, with Easter festivals, summer season colleges, movie star lectures, offshoots in Bristol and London and provincial touring performances. Neither theatre nor commune ever materialised, however the Competition acquired a small orchestra and a resident quartet, and produced a startling vary of works, from operas by Edgar Bainton and Clarence Raybould to Gluck and Wagner. Dance, by Isadora Duncan disciples Margaret Morris and Penelope Spencer, additionally featured, and dramas poetic and in any other case. Boughton contributed the whole lot from his Arthurian operas to settings of Marie Stopes’s Japanese Noh play translations, (foreshadowing Britten and Curlew River), songs, choral works, and the mystery-play Bethlehem.
There was nothing else prefer it in Britain, and by no means actually had been – a vivid, thrilling experimental nexus to compete with European establishments. Performances had been reported in nationwide papers. Audiences made pilgrimages from London and all around the nation. Shaw in contrast it favourably to Bayreuth. Many supporters, although, like Vaughan Williams and Holst, nonetheless felt it was too amateurish. Definitely circumstances had been tough and prepared: many outside performances, then as now, foundered in rain and dirt; productions had been slightly hit or miss, as when Christina designed some masks which almost asphyxiated the exhausted refrain, a lot to Shaw’s amusement; Gwen Ffrancon-Davies, now a number one singer-actress, remembered being awarded the one solo dressing-room – a tiny understairs broom cabinet, candlelit as a result of the Meeting Rooms had no electrical energy.
Different tensions quickly developed. Native playwright Alice Buckton tried to start out her personal competition. Boughton, dissatisfied with Buckley, drew nearer to Shaw, who despised Buckley; he died tragically younger at warfare’s finish. Boughton started one more affair, this time with teenage pupil Kathleen Davis, inflicting great misery to Christina and their associates. In 1917, at 38, he was referred to as up for 2 years, changing into the new-born RAF’s first bandmaster, whereas Christina saved the Competition going. Nevertheless it was about to launch a startling success.
The Immortal Hour, the epitome of ‘Celtic Twilight’, had come to embody Glastonbury’s idealistic, quasi-mystical atmosphere. Elgar referred to as it ‘a piece of genius’; Dame Ethel Smyth was ‘enchanted by it’, and Shaw and any
variety of different musical luminaries praised it. Vaughan Williams stated that in another nation ‘it might have been within the repertoire years in the past’. From a play by one ‘Fiona Macleod’ (really a slightly bizarre Glasgow critic referred to as William Sharp) it retells an previous Gaelic legend of the Sidhe – stunning however perilous superhumans, the mannequin for Tolkien’s elves. Deluded by Dalua, god of goals and insanity, the poet-king Eochaid marries the mysterious waif Etain. She, although, is the misplaced spouse of the Sidhe lord Midir, who attracts her again, to Eochaid’s break, with ardent singing: the well-known (and misnamed) ‘Faerie Music’. This Pelléas-like story impressed Boughton to his best atmospheric and melodic music, influenced, like Bantock, by Marjorie Kennedy-Fraser’s Hebridean music collections. In 1921 the good actor-manager Sir Barry Jackson mounted the Hour in Birmingham after which London, with Gwen Ffrancon-Davies as Etain. Unexpectedly it grew to become a runaway success, casting a Tolkienesque spell that drew folks again to see it time and again. The Hour nonetheless holds the document for steady opera performances – 221, with 160 the following yr – in addition to touring, and aroused curiosity overseas; the ‘Faerie Music’ was carried out all over the place. It made Boughton a nationwide movie star, comparatively affluent, and put Glastonbury firmly on the map. Characteristically, its upper-class recognition appalled him.
Success spurred Boughton to supply nonetheless extra Glastonbury operas, persevering with the Arthurian cycle and including The Queen of Cornwall, by Thomas Hardy no much less, and Alkestis, which was efficiently taken up by Covent Backyard. Many featured Kathleen, for whom, after considering a ménage à trois, he finally broke with Christina, alienating backers such because the shoe-manufacturing Clark household. Nonetheless Christina remained at Glastonbury. By 1926, although at all times financially straitened, it had mounted over 350 staged works, over 100 live shows and recitals, and lots of different occasions. So how may one thing so alive disappear so totally?
What occurred to the unique Glastonbury Competition?
Boughton, sadly, was rising sensitive at what he noticed as his personal exploitation, even considerably paranoid. Like many contemporaries, he grew to become naively attracted by the Soviet revolution. In 1926 the Glastonbury firm staged important fund-raising London performances of Bethlehem. With out consulting his fellow administrators Boughton produced it with Joseph and Mary as hanging miners and Herod as a caricature top-hatted capitalist. The idea, endorsed by GK Chesterton and others, was innocent sufficient – besides that Boughton additionally depicted British bobbies and British troops marching off to bloodbath the Innocents. So quickly after the First World Struggle this triggered monumental offence even with liberal London audiences. And so Bethlehem made a disastrous loss. The opposite administrators duly resigned; the Glastonbury townsfolk withdrew their help. The Competition was deserted.
Boughton, along with his now intensive household, retired unrepentant to a Gloucestershire smallholding purchased for him by a feminine admirer, the place he lived on, nonetheless compulsively composing, writing and proposing new festivals, till his loss of life in 1960. However though his symphonies and different works had been supported by Vaughan Williams, Arthur Bliss and others, he was more and more forgotten. The Immortal Hour grew to become relegated to wretched beginner performances, its ‘Faerie Music’ to twee standard tenors and schoolgirls. Boughton’s politics are typically blamed; he remained fanatically pro-Soviet till painfully disillusioned by the 1956 Hungarian revolt. Nevertheless, many different fellow-travellers fared higher. His prickliness didn’t assist. Within the phrases of his biographer Michael Hurd, he ‘had dug his personal grave, and would commit the following few years to pulling within the earth on high of himself’, antagonising even these properly disposed to him, till it grew to become straightforward to overlook his Glastonbury accomplishments and write him off as a crank. Ultimately, in nice want, he was awarded a modest Civil Listing pension. His kids grew to become completed musicians, together with the well-known oboist Pleasure Boughton.
In the end, it was Glastonbury’s complete fey-folksiness which got here to look impossibly quaint, parochial and old style within the post-war period. Not altogether unfairly; a few of its music is remarkably vapid. Nonetheless current Boughton recordings, together with songs, symphonies and Bethlehem, make a hanging impression. Above all, The Immortal Hour, static and stylised because it appears, nonetheless conjures up one thing of that unique, long-forgotten pleasure: the genuine Glastonbury magic.
