"BELLIGERENTLY BRITISH"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 368, 12 July 1946, Page 22

"BELLIGERENTLY BRITISH"

Vaughan Williams’ "Sir John in| Love"

AUGHAN WILLIAMS once complained that the Englishman demands his music from any street rather than his own. His complaint was largely justified, especially as regards opera. Prewar audiences which flocked to Covent Garden to hear Puccini and Verdi would fot give British opera a hearing. Because he was even then almost a venerable composer, critics politely received Vaughan Williams’ first opera, Hugh the Drover (1924), but it was soon forgotten. A few years later (1929) he tried again, his second opera being Sir John in Love, a robust musical treatment of Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor. When this work was presented at Sadler’s Wells in April last, the audience was torn between affection for the composer and dislike of the actual performance. But Vaughan Williams took ten curtain calls with the cast.

= Critics say that whatever its eventual fate, Sir John is strongly-even bellig-erently-British in character, as is most of Williams’ other music. Now 74, and a possessor of the Order of Merit, Williams was past 30 when his work for choir and orchestra Towards the Unknown Region was performed. He has written extensively since then, but the essence of his inspiration remains the English countryside, Looking more like a farmer than a composer, he has pronoynced ideas on modern music: "I simply cannot make head or tail of this new-fangled wrong-note stuff." On one point Vaughan Williams could rest contented. The possible ‘failure of Sir John would not now bother him financially. He inherited more than £90,000 from his brother in 1944,