Ed Zubrow:

>On (I believe) Steve Schwartz's recommendation I purchased

Always a bad idea.

>Vaughan William's Pilgrims Progress.  I'm intrigued that he left it off
>his list of good English Librettos and wondered if he might wish to comment
>on this.

I find the libretto very conventional - well done in its way, but hardly a
literary earth-shaker.

>Frankly, I'm not surprised.  For a piece that VW apparently worked on
>throughout his life, both libretto and music seemed to me rather flaccid.
>Wonderful in spots, but not great opera.

I agree about the libretto, but certainly not the music.  As to "great
opera," to me it's at least as good as Parzival and Moses und Aron (neither
one my favorite).

>I was also struck by the relative scarcity of one of the things that I most
>appreciate in opera: ensemble singing.

It's got all sorts of ensembles - the Vanity Fair sequence, the
Woodcutter's Boy, the Arming of the Pilgrim, the incredible Entrance
into the Celestial City.

>Despite the beauty of much of the music it seemed lacking in drama or
>interaction among the characters beyond their characterizations.

Just like Parzival.  Seriously, we think of opera as conflict and there
really is none, in my opinion.  The conclusion is pretty much set.  I can
understand the problems one would have with a stage performance, but PP
will hardly ever be staged.  The only way to know it is and will probably
remain through recording.  So what we have is essentially an "inner drama,"
a drama that took place in the composer's mind, as much a connecting of the
present to the history and art of England.  It's not Tosca.  I find it
somewhere between pageant and opera.  If you can enter into that without
expecting Boheme, I think it a very great, though a bit flawed, work
indeed.  To me, the flaws don't matter.

Vaughan Williams was well aware of the problems that the work posed, both
with respect to production and public acceptance.  As to the first, he
fiercely defended it as an opera, rather than a pageant, and believed that
an imaginative director could overcome the problems.  The rub is that few
directors are really imaginative and few opera singers can really act.

>But, in the context of this post, I was just wondering if these are some
>of the reasons Steve left it off his list.  And, similarly, to propose an
>additional one that does seem to explore the depths of human psychology in
>a fascinating (if ambiguous way) what about Britten's Peter Grimes?

Again, the Peter Grimes libretto is a thoroughly competent piece of work
but, again, conventional.  I think the Gloriana libretto much more daring
and dramatically capable.

That's my two cents.

Steve Schwartz