VAUGHAN WILLIAMS AT 85

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 947, 4 October 1957, Page 23

VAUGHAN WILLIAMS AT 85

|F you're past 80 it’s highly probable nowadays that someone will celebrate your birthday. If you’re past 80 and famous it becomes inescapable. Hence the widespead rejoicing around October 12 to mark the 85th birthday of one of Britain’s greatest composers, Ralph Vaughan Williams. The NZBS marks the day itself with the first of a series of programmes of the composer’s works. At 7.30 p.m. on Saturday, October 12, all YC stations will broadcast The House of Life, a cycle of six songs with words by Rossetti set to music by Vaughan Williams. The singer will be the baritone Donald Munro, with Doris Sheppard at the piano. Listeners who have been following the current YC series of English operas will also be celebrating the Vaughan Williams birthday. The third of the operas, to be broadcast at 8.0 p.m. on Sunday, October 13, is Vaughan Williams’s Sir John in Love.

Hubert Foss has suggested that "Falstaff had been slyly standing at Vaughan Williams’s elbow for many long years," and the composer himself makes no apologies to Shakespeare. "He is fair game, like the Bible, and may be made use of . . . even for advertisements for soap and razors." Those wishing to follow the opera’s plot therefore are referred to The Merry Wives of Windsor. The text is taken almost entirely from that play, with the addition of lyrics by other Elizabethan poets, and what Vaughan Williams describes as "a few unimportant remarks of my own." The borrowings and _ additions, together with the music (the famous "Fantasia on Greensleeves" is an interlude in the opera), give Sir John in Love a sweeter, more romantic air than Shakespeare’s original. The recording to be played by the YC stations was produced by the BBC.