Labour of a lifetime
Ralph Vaughan Williams knew that he wasn’t what most people would consider an operatic composer: ‘They won’t like it. They don’t want an opera with no heroine and no love duets – and I don’t care. It’s what I meant and there it is.’
Driving back to Dorking from the premiere of his final opera The Pilgrim’s Progress on 26 April 1951, he had a fair idea of what the general audience felt and what the critics would say next morning – and he was more or less right. Having previously written four full-length operas and a few shorter theatrical works, he knew just how to work the genre for his own distinctive purpose.
The apparent failure of The Pilgrim’s Progress hurt Vaughan Williams more than any other creative rebuff
That the inexperienced team allocated to his score at Covent Garden didn’t really understand how to realise his very personal vision
