R. Vaughan Williams - Job: A Masque for Dancing

preface The conception

preface The conception of Job was a family affair. The idea came from Geoffrey Keynes, surgeon and Blake scholar, in 1927 (the centenary of William Blake’s death). Keynes consulted his sister-in-law, the recently widowed artist Gwendolen Raverat (née Darwin). 1 The composer they approached, Ralph Vaughan Williams, was her second cousin. Raverat drew up an extended scenario, derived from Blake’s series of illustrations inspired by the Old Testament Book of Job. 2 She translated the scenario into French and showed it to Boris Kochno at Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. It is not clear whether Diaghilev himself saw it, but the scenario was rejected as ‘too English’ and ‘old-fashioned’. 3 Vaughan Williams expressed some relief (‘not sour grapes’) at this rejection. He insisted—reasonably enough in relation to this subject, and to Blake’s conception—that the work be subtitled ‘A Masque for Dancing’; he felt uneasy about the word ‘ballet’ which, he remarked to the author and critic Edwin Evans, had ‘acquired unfortunate connotations of late years to me’ (December 1930). 4 The choice of ‘masque’ (a genre that usually involves vocal music as well as dancing and mime) may have been intended in the composer’s mind to locate the work within a tradition he considered English, rather than the cosmopolitanism represented by the Ballets Russes. The Elizabethan/Jacobean masque is evoked not only in the work’s tableau-like construction (which also derives from Blake) but by the use of dances such as Saraband, Minuet, Pavane, and Galliard. 5 The visual element was of the highest importance, and Vaughan Williams’s autograph score includes small reproductions of Blake’s illustrations, which are referred to throughout in the stage directions. 6 Vaughan Williams quickly became absorbed in the project; indeed in his enthusiasm, according to Keynes, ‘he became rather difficult to control’. 7 But he had more theatrical experience than his collaborators and was fully justified in taking his own decisions about the scenario. Comparison of surviving versions by Alison Sanders McFarland shows that the composer adjusted the order of scenes implied by Blake’s sequence, avoiding the tautology of having Job twice awakened from sleep. 8 Job’s sin of material satisfaction (explicit in Raverat’s version) licenses Satan’s intervention; she and Keynes were influenced by the interpretation of Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job (itself already a departure from the biblical narrative) by the Blake scholar Joseph Wicksteed, by which God and Satan are, in effect, de-mythologized to become aspects of Job himself. 9 However intellectually cogent, this interpretation does not lend itself to theatrical presentation, where supernatural characters and action are perceived as ‘real’. Vaughan Williams adopted the Blake–Keynes designation of Job’s ‘comforters’ as ‘wily hypocrites’; rather than the irritating friends of the Bible, they become agents of Satan, as is marked by the stage direction and the music. Nevertheless, the masque requires some extra-textual knowledge to be fully understood. Elihu’s dance is an effective musical contrast at this point, but does not express the sense of his intervention; his ‘wrath was kindled’ against Job and his comforters (Job 32:2), and his arguments induce Job to repent his worldliness. The conception of Satan derives from Blake. He appears to win the wager with God, only to be rebuffed; so evocative of evil is his music that this seems inevitable, if unfair. Instead of the full restoration of Job’s fortunes implied in the Bible, the masque ends on a pastoral, even nostalgic, note, with Job’s daughters comforting his old age. Compared to the extended arguments of the original, and even Blake’s and Raverat’s thinking, Vaughan Williams’s scenario is theologically less complex, aiming to heighten emotion and contrast to better theatrical effect, the music embracing a wider stylistic range than is normally found in his orchestral works. for online perusal only 1 Full documentation of Job was assembled in the Journal of the RVW Society, 19 (October 2000): Deborah Heckert, ‘“A Typically English Institution”: A Context for Vaughan Williams’s Masques’, pp. 4–6; Sir Geoffrey Keynes, ‘The Origins of Job’, pp. 16–17; Frank W. D. Ries, ‘Sir Geoffrey Keynes and the Ballet Job’, pp. 18–22 (based on interviews and including correspondence of Raverat, Vaughan Williams, Ninette de Valois, and Lydia Lopokova); Stephen Connock, ‘Gwen Raverat: Her Role in Job’, p. 22. This issue of the journal also contains a comprehensive review of recordings by William Hedley, and illustrations from stage productions. 2 William Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job (London as the Act directs March 8: 1825 by William Blake Fountain Court Strand). The watercolours can be viewed at www.themorgan.org/ collection/William-Blakes-World/18, and at www.blakearchive. org/work/but550. The engravings published in 1826 can be found at www.blakearchive.org/work/bb421. The engravings may also be seen in the Blake Room at Tate Britain, Millbank, London. 3 Frances Spalding, Gwen Raverat: Friends, Family & Affections (London: Harvill, 2001), pp. 332–7. 4 Letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams 1895–1958, ed. Hugh Cobbe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 183–4. 5 Heckert (see note 1). 6 In the autograph, however, the illustrations are not numbered according to the system used in the score. 7 Keynes (see note 1), p. 16. 8 Alison Sanders McFarland, ‘A Deconstruction of William Blake’s Vision: Vaughan Williams and Job’, in Vaughan Williams Essays, ed. Byron Adams and Robin Wells (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 29– 53; the appendix contains all surviving scenarios, two of which, by Keynes and Vaughan Williams, are presented by Michael Kennedy, A Catalogue of the Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams (2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 132–5. 9 Joseph N. Wicksteed, Blake’s Vision of the Book of Job (London: J. M. Dent, 1910); McFarland (see note 8), p. 31. v

Composition and Performance The music was begun in 1927. Vaughan Williams admitted that he was in danger of composing it before the scenario was finalized. In August he told Raverat that he would not take too much account of Wicksteed’s interpretation. 10 The music was drafted in a score, now largely missing, for two pianos. As usual, he discussed his work in progress with Gustav Holst: ‘I should be alarmed to say how many “Field Days” we spent over it’. 11 Rejection by the Ballets Russes may have convinced him that Job had a more promising future in the concert hall, and accordingly he scored it for too large an orchestra for a normal theatre pit. The first performances were not staged. The premiere, as a programmatic concert work, was given during the Norfolk and Norwich Festival on 23 October 1930, in St Andrew’s Hall, Norwich, with the Queen’s Hall Orchestra conducted by the composer. The first London performance was a studio broadcast, accessible only in the London region, by the BBC Symphony Orchestra on 13 February 1931, again conducted by the composer. The first public concert performance in London followed on 3 December 1931, after the first stage performances; it was given by the orchestra of the Royal Philharmonic Society, conducted by Basil Cameron, in the Queen’s Hall. Meanwhile the first staged performances had taken place on 5 and 6 July 1931 in the Cambridge Theatre, London, which had opened the previous September. Job was one of the new works performed under the auspices of the Camargo Society, active from 1930 to 1933. The society’s aim was to develop a national ballet company, with strong influence from the Ballets Russes (Diaghilev having died in 1929). Among those involved were Philip J. S. Richardson, Arnold Haskell, the economist John Maynard Keynes (brother of Geoffrey), and his wife, the ballerina Lydia Lopokova. Vaughan Williams attributed their acceptance of his work to Holst. 12 Writing to Edwin Evans, he insisted on full acknowledgement of Keynes’s and Raverat’s involvement, with the stipulation that he himself must be allowed to veto anything that ‘to my mind does not agree with my music’. 13 In March 1931 he wrote to Adrian Boult, to whom the work was eventually dedicated, hoping that he might conduct it, and mentioning that the piano reduction by Vally Lasker was under way, adding with characteristic (and unnecessary) self-deprecation that ‘the score is illegible’. 14 It was, however, the composer and conductor Constant Lambert who directed the stage premiere of Job. Among the cast, God is not listed as a character, being replaced by ‘Job’s Spiritual Self’, an interpretation closer to Blake and to Raverat’s scenario. Making a fortuitous link with the Ballets Russes, Anton Dolin danced Satan. 15 Raverat designed the sets and costumes after Blake, with some necessary compromise. 16 The choreography was by Ninette de Valois. The production transferred to the Sadler’s Wells company and their first performance was at the Old Vic theatre on 22 September 1931. In 1933 the Camargo Society’s repertoire was merged with that of the Vic-Wells Ballet (which subsequently became the Royal Ballet), and Job was performed several times during the next few years. Following the company’s move to the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, the work was revived in 1948 with new sets and costumes (which Keynes disliked), designed by John Piper. A revival in 2006 restored Raverat’s designs. To accommodate a pit orchestra, Lambert had made a reduction for ‘theatre orchestra’ prior to the Cambridge Theatre performance (see Sources). When Lambert died in August 1951, Vaughan Williams wrote a reminiscence for Hubert Foss, including a specific tribute to Lambert’s conducting of Job and his orchestral reduction, ‘to the then dimensions of Sadler’s Wells [sic]’. He praised the use of harp in the bass register, and added: ‘These rehearsals were the only occasions on which I knew him really worried and nervous. Rehearsal time was short, the orchestra was difficult, the clarinet said he could not, according to his trade union rules, double clarinet and saxophone, & so on, but he [Lambert] triumphed over it all’. 17 Opera houses capable of mounting Wagner, however, can accommodate the full orchestral version. That Lambert’s arrangement has the same number of bars as the printed full score suggests that Vaughan Williams had already made the cuts that are visible in the autograph. Yet after the first stage performance he wrote to Raverat, congratulating her on a Spectator review, and suggesting that he was reluctantly prepared to make a further cut in Scene IV: ‘If we cannot have the procession I am cutting a good deal of the music there’. 18 He expressed reservations about the choreography, and was ‘unrepentant’ about his decision to order the scenes differently from the Bible and from Blake. He suggested that they might experiment with reversing the order of Scenes IV and V, to accord with Blake’s sequence; this is given as an alternative within the printed score and piano reduction, but Vaughan Williams’s ordering, with the dream foretelling news of disaster, seems preferable from a dramatic point of view. for online perusal only The Orchestra Wind Instruments When scoring for a large orchestra, Vaughan Williams characteristically offered reductions that might help obtain performances, 19 providing cues in other parts for instruments that might not be available: flute in G, saxophone, 10 Letters, p. 158. 11 Ralph Vaughan Williams, National Music and Other Essays, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 194. 12 Ibid. 13 Letters, pp. 183–4. 14 Letters, p. 189. 15 Michael Kennedy lists the full cast in Catalogue, p. 131. 16 Spalding, Gwen Raverat, p. 335. 17 Letters, pp. 491–2. 18 Letters, pp. 192, 194. It seems this procession was indeed cut; Ries, ‘Sir Geoffrey Keynes and the Ballet Job’, p. 21. 19 Letters, p. 183. vi