Vaughan Williams had a great fondness for Shakespeare and settings of Shakespeare’s texts thread their way through the composer’s life, from the songs The Willow Song (1897), and Orpheus With His Lute (1903), to the larger scale Serenade to Music (1938) and the choral masterpiece, Three Shakespeare Songs (1951), not to mention his opera, Sir John in Love (1928).
From 1886 to 1919, the actor manager Frank Benson presented Shakespeare at the Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. For the most part, the music used by the company was a hotch-potch of existing material rather than anything specially written. As something of an experiment, Vaughan Williams came to compose and conduct at Stratford-upon-Avon for a summer season in August 1912, and again from 21 April to 14 May 1913. By then, Vaughan Williams had already written incidental music for Ben Jonson masque, Pan’s Anniversary (1905), a play based on John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1906) and Aristophanes The Wasps (1909) and he arrived in Stratford expecting to be able to match music to the specific history plays.
Not a bit, the actors were wedded to their conventional incidental music and only for Henry V and Richard II was the composer allowed a free hand. A number of manuscript scores and parts survive in the library of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and from these various hands have reconstructed the music and created concert sequences.
A new disc from Albion Records, Royal Throne of Kings: Vaughan Williams and Shakespeare, is enabling us to hear this music, with James Ross conducting the Kent Sinfonia, an ensemble more closely approximating in size the sort of band that Benson’s troupe might have used.
The disc enables us to hear the composer’s varied responses to these dramatic stimuli, but of as much interest is the knowledge that the mine of unrecorded, unplayed Vaughan Williams is running out and this may well be one of the last major discs of his undiscovered orchestral music.
The disc includes a short cue from Richard III, a suite from Henry IV, arranged by Malcolm Riley and the overture to Henry V . The composer Nathaniel Lew also put together a Stratford Suite, reusing music from various dramatic sources. In 1944, Vaughan Williams was asked to provide incidental music for a planned BBC radio production of Richard II. The plan was abandoned and the music forgotten. The cues are all rather too short to make satisfactory listening on their own, so Nathaniel Lew has arranged them into a concert fantasy. The disc is completed by two movements that Vaughan Williams wrote for the 1955 film, The England of Elizabeth, as well as a selection of the composer’s solo Shakespeare settings.
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| James Ross and Kent Sinfonia in France in 2022 |
Further information on the recording, see link tree (released 1 November 2024) and RVW Society’s website.
