Shakespeare plays and from contemporary Elizabethan poets and playwrights (including Jonson, Fletcher, Middleton, Campion, and Marlowe) to supply suitably romantic texts for Anne and Fenton, but also humorous and ceremonial verses for the other characters and chorus. 4 Sixteen of the twenty-one such interpolations can be found in two volumes of Elizabethan lyrics that were republished in Stratford by Arthur Henry Bullen in 1913 while the composer was living there; his copies are now in the British Library. It could be objected, however, that he has allowed too much time to be given to the French court physician Dr Caius and the Welsh parson Sir Hugh Evans, both of whose linguistic peculiarities, so extensively exploited by Shakespeare, are somewhat lost when sung rather than spoken. Composition The opera was written while the composer and his wife Adeline were living at 13 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. The composition of the opera took from 1924 to 1928, and was not finally finished even then. Few piano sketches survive, although a seven-movement suite, extracted by the composer from the opera, exists in a copyist’s reduction for two pianos, at which point the opera was to have been called Fat Knight, later retitled ‘from Sir John in Love’. This has now been completed, orchestrated (with reference to the opera), and recorded. It would seem from Vaughan Williams’s instructions in the autograph full scores, that he left the piano arrangement for the vocal score to others, in particular David Evans of Dorking (Act I), Archie Jacobs (brother of Gordon), a regular OUP copyist (Acts II and III), and his ex-pupil Arnold Foster (Act IV). In the autograph of Acts I and II, the verbal text of the vocal lines and occasional stage directions have been entered in pencil mostly by the composer and after made clearer in ink by another hand; could this have been that of the fine musician and colleague at the Royal College of Music, S. P. Waddington, to whom he dedicated the opera? The text and stage directions of Acts III and IV are in the hand of Arnold Foster. The work is much influenced by the use of folksong (ten English, one French), a psalm tune, and two folk dances, notably ‘Half Hannikin’ with which the opera ends. Certain episodes outstay their welcome, and the composer subsequently suggested optional cuts in both the full and vocal scores. Performance The opera was first given at four ‘private’ performances in the modest Parry Opera Theatre at the Royal College of Music on 21, 22, 25, and 26 March 1929, ably conducted by Dr Malcolm Sargent and produced by Cairns James. It is believed that it was only shortly before this that the trio for the three principal women, ‘Sigh no more ladies’, (from Much Ado about Nothing), was added. Among the student cast who later came to prominence were William Herbert (Simple), Imogen Holst (an imp in Act IV) and Muir Mathieson (chorus).This student production has resulted (apart from the vocal redistributions) in a number of stage directions in the vocal score, which clearly derive from the original production and the inadequate resources of the RCM theatre. They are given here, but are no longer necessary. It also accounts for the extra music to cover the scene changes, including the almost symphonic entr’acte between Scenes II and III of Act III. It was presumably much the same forces that gave a few performances in Oxford in May 1930. For the six performances first given on 30 October and then in November 1933 by the Bristol Opera School in the Victoria Rooms, Clifton, the composer (who by this time had moved to Dorking) added three new scenes. The first, Prologue, ambitiously set in the Great Hall of Windsor Castle, and featuring the silent appearance of Queen Elizabeth, was designed to show how she had commanded the play to be written through the voice of her Lord Chamberlain. These were probably the only performances ever given of the Prologue, for the scene was later withdrawn by the composer. Next came an Episode, to be played in Act I just before rehearsal figure 34, which depicts the thieving activities of Bardolph, Nym, and Pistol. The third was the Interlude, originally to be played between Scenes I and II of Act II, or between Acts I and II, but subsequently placed at the beginning of Act III as Scene I (the former Scene I now renamed Scene II). This largely concerns the continued wooing of Anne Page by Fenton. All three inserts were engraved as an additional vocal score by OUP in 1936; the pages devoted to the Prologue were later removed, so that this hire publication now begins on page 18. On 4 April 1946 Sir John in Love was at long last given a fully professional staging when it was mounted by the opera company at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, conducted by Lawrance Collingwood, and produced by Sumner Austin. For this important event OUP had most of the orchestral parts recopied. The last performances during the composer’s lifetime were given in the same venue by the young, Cambridge-based, New Opera Company in the summer of 1958, a few weeks before he died on 26 August. Several sections of the full score were recopied by Roy Douglas in 1970. Perusal Score Not for Performance The Vocal Score A year after the 1929 stage premiere of Sir John in Love at the RCM, the OUP music department (founded in 1923) published a vocal score of the opera, up to that time by far its largest undertaking, that was beautifully engraved by Henderson & Spalding Ltd, and remains the basic text for singers and rehearsal accompanists. It contains the composer’s fulsome dedication to S. P. Waddington (1869–1953), a Preface in which he excuses his choice of Falstaff for yet another opera (including Holst’s 1924 one-acter At the Boar’s Head), and vigorously justifies his use of folk tunes. In the summer of 2019 the British Library was presented with the proofs of Act I of this important publication, corrected by the composer, which seems to indicate that, apart from overseeing the rest of the edition, it was he who was vi
esponsible for certain additions and corrections to his autograph full score, most of which have been silently incorporated into the present orchestral score. After the composer’s death in 1958, this vocal score was revised by Roy Douglas in 1970 and republished in July 1971. The vocal staves and tempi of this score have now been brought into line, where necessary, with the present new edition. It should also be noted that in 1931 the composer made a five-movement cantata, adapted from the opera, for mixed chorus and orchestra which he titled In Windsor Forest. Publication of the Full Score Until this edition, the full score of the opera had never been published. Dr Malcolm Sargent and, it would seem, Robert Percival who produced and conducted the 1933 Clifton performances, used as their conducting scores the original volumes made for the Hire Library by OUP copyists. Sargent’s authoritative, blue crayon, additions to the scores (authoritative, because Vaughan Williams attended the RCM rehearsals) are given when of interest in the Textual Notes. Percival’s markings can be seen on the full score copies of the Episode and Interlude. For the first publication of the full score, the editor has had access to the composer’s autographs which his widow presented to the British Museum, now Library. These have been supplemented, when necessary, by secondary sources, notably Endnotes 1 Stephen Connock, Toward the Sun Rising: Ralph Vaughan Williams Remembered (Tonbridge: Albion Music, 2018), 221. 2 Despite the unbounded admiration of his RCM teacher Stanford, who had attended the premiere at La Scala, Milan, Vaughan Williams did not fully admire Falstaff because he felt Boito’s libretto did not play sufficiently to Verdi’s lyrical strengths (see ‘Verdi: A Symposium’, Opera, 2/3 (1951), 112). 3 For an informative and extended discussion of the probable influence that Benson’s production had on Vaughan Williams’s opera, see Roger Savage, ‘Alice Shortcake, Jenny Pluckpears, and the Stratford-upon- the published vocal score. The punctuation of the Folio text of the play is, like that of the others, famously incomplete, so the editor has added to it with reference to the latest editions of the play in the Oxford Shakesepeare series (1990) and the Arden Shakespeare series (2000). These publications have also been consulted with regard to the text itself. The editorial process, though time-consuming, has been relatively straightforward, and even the composer’s notoriously bad handwriting (because he was naturally left-handed) has been not too difficult to decipher. It is hoped that this new text, the result of what Vaughan Williams used to describe as a ‘face-wash’, will not only remain the authoritative text for a number of years, but also encourage more performances of a melodious, amusing and light-hearted opera (which are notoriously in short supply), of which its prolific composer appears always to have been not only very fond, but also proud. Acknowledgements The editor would like to thank Hugh Cobbe, the staff of the Music Division of OUP and that of the British library, Michael Durnin and Georgina Miller for their help in the preparation of this publication. David Lloyd-Jones London, 2019 Avon Connections of Vaughan Williams’s “Sir John in Love”’, Music and Letters, 89/1 (2008), 18–55. In particular, Slender’s efforts to write a sonnet for Anne Page, which hardly occurs in the play, seems to have been influenced by the actor of that part’s attempt to embellish his role. 4 A full listing of the verses from other plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries used in the opera and in the three additional scenes, can be found in Michael Kennedy, A Catalogue of the Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams (rev. edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 121–4. Perusal Score Not for Performance vii
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