Bob Chen wrote: >I would like to learn a bit more about the British composer Rutland >Boughton. > >Specifically, I would like to know what Boughton's Glastonbury Festivals >were and why they ended. I read somewhere that the festival was Boughton's >attempt to create a British Bayreuth. Exactly. The festivals were set up and backed mainly by old-line Socialists like Shaw and Sybil Thorndyke. There was a strong political component to them. Boughton's Bethlehem, for example, was produced in reaction to the General Strike. It was Bayreuth in that the productions seemed to be Parsifal-like pageants, as far as I can tell. They stopped because they ran out of money. It was, according to Shaw, always done on the cheap - piano rather than orchestral accompaniment, although the works were conceived in full orchestral form. As far as I know, no other composer was performed there other than Boughton, but I could be wrong. >Also, there is an oblique reference to Boughton's activities after >Glastonbury -- "politics and lecturing." What kind of politics? Lecturing >about what? Boughton was an idealist, in both the good and bad senses of the term. He also had a penchant for grand schemes. Politically, I gather he became more conservative as he grew older, with a slight anti-Semitic, paranoid tinge. There's a letter to Vaughan Williams, for example, complaining about VW's opera "Pilgrim's Progress." Vaughan Williams had changed Christian's name to Pilgrim, and Boughton chaffed him about it, although the kidding was in earnest. >Finally, in addition to "The Immortal Hour," which appears to be available >only on Hyperion as a mid-price two-fer, can anyone recommend other >works/recordings? Definitely Bethlehem, which I find the loveliest thing he wrote (on Hyperion). Boughton's music doesn't make my neck hairs stand up, but I can easily imagine people enjoying his post-Wagnerian idiom more than I do. Steve Schwartz