100 years on

This year marks a century since the premieres of two Vaughan Williams works coloured by the First World War. His Pastoral Symphony blindsided everyone. Only in the 1950s did it seep out that, far from portraying an English rural idyll, quantities of the music reflect the composer’s experience of the waging of war across ravaged landscapes of northern France.

His short opera, The Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains, is far more than the ‘Pastoral Episode’ Vaughan Williams described it as. The nature of its forensically compiled text, garnered by the composer himself from across the length and breadth of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, reveals the work to be nothing short of a deeply felt memorial to the Fallen.