Rutland Boughton

Rutland Boughton

Rutland Boughton (Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire January 23, 1878 – London, January 25, 1960), a pupil of Charles Villiers Stanford and Walford Davies at the Royal College of Music in London, became well known in the early 20th century as a composer of opera and choral music. His output included three symphonies; several concertos; part-songs; songs; chamber music and opera (which he called "Music Drama" after Wagner).

His best known work was the operaThe Immortal Hour. His Bethlehem, based on the Coventry Nativity Play and notable for its unique choral arrangements of traditional Christmas carols and first performed during the Glastonbury Festival School in 1915, also became very popular with choral societies world-wide.

Other operas by Boughton were: The Birth of Arthur (1913),The Round Table (1916), The Lily Maid (1934), Avalon and Galahad (1945)(both from the Arthurian cycle of music dramas);'The Moon Maiden (1919), Alkestis (1922), and The Queen of Cornwall (1924).

Through the Boughton Trust (see below), many of his major works have been recorded and are available on disc including The Immortal Hour, Bethlehem,, Symphony No 1 "Oliver Cromwell", Symphony No 2, Symphony No 3, Oboe Concerto No 1, string quartets and various chamber pieces and songs.

In addition to his compositions, Boughton is remembered for his attempt to create an "English Bayreuth" at Glastonbury, establishing the first Glastonbury Festival (They ran with enormous success and sophistication from 1914 until 1926. From 1927, and until his death in 1960, he lived at Kilcot near Newent, Gloucestershire.

Biography

Rutland Boughton was the son of grocer William Boughton (1841-1905) whose shop occupied Buckingham Street in the town of Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. From an early age he showed signs of exceptional talent for music although formal training opportunities did not become available to him. In 1892 he was apprenticed to a London concert agency and six years later his attention was attracted by several influential musicians including the Rothschild family that enabled him to raise sufficient monies to study at the RCM in London. The amount raised, however, was only sufficient to maintain his studies for one year after which he left the RCM and took up ad-hoc work first in the pit of the Hayward Theatre then as official accompanist to the baritone David Ffrangcon Davies (whose daughter, Gwen, later became associated with the Glastonbury Festivals and became famous for her role Etain in The Immortal Hour). In 1903, he married Florence Hobley - an Aylesbury neighbour - that he was to regret years later. It was in 1905 (the year he tried without success to get his first symphony "Oliver Cromwell" performed) that he was approached by Sir Granville Bantock to become a member of staff at the Birmingham Institute of Music.

Birmingham Institute of Music

It was whilst at Birmingham (1905 to 1911) Boughton was presented with many new opportunities and made many new friends. He proved an excellent teacher and an outstanding choral conductor which won him much recognition. He was drawn into the socialist ideas through the writings of John Ruskin, William Morris, Edward Carpenter and George Bernard Shaw, the latter with whom he developed a good relationship. It was also during those years that he became attached to the young art student, Christina Walshe, who was later to become his partner and artistic "right-hand" for his Glastonbury projects. His friendship with Shaw had begun when Boughton had been turned down from his invitation to collaborate on an opera. Shaw initially refused to be associated with any of Boughton's music but Boughton refused to be brushed aside and eventually they realised they shared the same political as well as social views a maintained a friendship that was to endure.

Out of his process of self-discovery and self-education, came the artistic aims that were to occupy Boughton for all his life. As a young man, he planned a fourteen-day cycle of dramas on the life of Christ in which the story would be enacted on a small stage in the middle of an orchestra while soloists and the chorus would comment on the action. Though this did not come to anything, the idea remained and by 1907 his discovery of the theories and practice of Wagner combined with his view that the church's view of Christianity had somewhat failed, he turned to another subject - King Arthur. Based on the Ring Cycles at Bayreuth, and the parallel ideas set about by the young poet Reginal Buckley in his book "Arthur of Britain", he set out to create a new form of opera which he later called "choral drama". At this point, the three collaborators - Boughton, Buckley and Walshe - would set out to establish a national festival of drama. Whilst London's Covent Garden was ideal for the established operatic repertoire, it would not prove to be so for Boughton and Buckley who decided to erect their own purpose theatre and using local talent, true to socialism, set up a form of commune. At first Letchworth Garden City in Hertfordshire was deemed a suitable site for the project (the Arts and Crafts Movement was significant at that time) but they later turned to the Somerset town of Glastonbury, the alleged resting place of King Arthur as the most ideal location.

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Boughton at Glastonbury, circa 1915

Glastonbury

By 1911, Rutland Boughton had resigned from Birmingham and moved to Glastonbury with the new lady in his life and to focus on establishing the country's first national annual summer school of music. The impetus was not in fact the project of the Arthurian Cycle but that of The Immortal Hour (see below) which he completed in 1914 and with a national appeal to raise funds was made, backed by Bantock, Thomas Beecham, John Galsworthy and Shaw. Edward Elgar promised to lay the foundation stone. However, in August 1914, the month set for the opening of the first production, war had been declared and the full plans had to be postponed. Boughton was still determined to proceed and the Festivals began but instead of Beecham's orchestra, he used a grand piano and instead of a theatre, he incorporated the local Assembly Rooms that were to remain the centre of activities until their end in 1926, by which time he had mounted over 350 staged works, 100 chamber concerts, exhibitions, lectures and recitals - something never previously been seen in England.

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Scene from The Immortal Hour

The most notable, and most successful, of Boughton's works is the opera "The Immortal Hour", an adaptation of the play by Fiona Macleod- the pseudonym name for William Sharp - based on Celtic mythology. Having been successful in Glastonbury and well received in Birmingham, the director of the then new Birmingham Repertory Theatre, [[Sir Barry Jackson {Theatre director)|Sir Barry Jackson]] decided to take the Glastonbury Players to London where it achieved so many runs, it broke a world record, one that is still held today - over 600 performances. On its arrival at the Regent Theatre in 1922, it secured an initial run of over 200 consecutive performances and a further 160 in 1923, with a highly successful revival in 1932. People came to see the opera time after time (including members of the Royal family) and especially to see the young Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies whose portrayal as Etain began her professional acting career. By this time, Rutland Boughton was hailed as the most important composer in the land, outranking his contemporaries Holst and Vaughan Williams and becoming as well known as Elgar.

His other notable operas are "The Queen of Cornwall" - based on Thomas Hardy's play - and "Alkestis" - based on the Greek play "Euripedes" and which reached the British National Opera Company at Covent Garden in 1933.

The downfall of the Glastonbury Festivals came about when Boughton, sympathising with the General Strike and the miners lockout of 1926, insisted on staging his very popular Nativity opera "Bethlehem" (1915) at Church House, Westminster, London, with Jesus born in a miner's cottage and Herod as the top-hatted Capitalist, flanked by soldiers and police. The event proved too much for the people of Glastonbury who withdrew their support for him causing the Festival Players to go into liquidation.

Beavans Hill, Kilcot

Commemoration plaque at Kilcot

Later life

From 1927 until his death in 1960, Boughton lived at Kilcot, near Newent in Herefordshire where he completed the last two operas of his Arthurian cycle (Avalon and Galahad which to this day have not been performed) and produced some of his best orchestral music - including two symphonies, concertii, chamber music and songs, the quality of these of which has only been realised within the past 20 years. In 1934 and 1935, Boughton attempted to repeat his earlier successes at Glastonbury with festivals commissioned at Stroud (1934) and Bath (1935) and although these saw the release of new works - "The Lily Maid" (the third in the Arthurian cycle) and "The Ever Young" - they were short-lived and Boughton, together with his political leanings towards Communism, never recovered and for the next 40 years - save for a few productions of his works -he became unjustly neglected. Boughton died at the home of his daughter Joy (the famous oboist)in Barnes, London, in 1960.

The Rutland Boughton Music Trust

To restore the composer's reputation, The Rutland Boughton Music Trust was established in 1978, the year of the composer's Centenary, to encourage performances and sponsor recordings of the works of Rutland Boughton. Many works, including some world premieres, now appear on disc with the Hyperion Records Ltd label. The "Oliver Cromwell" symphony - first heard in 2005 -has been released by Dutton and a selection of Songs are on the British Music Society own label.

Some major works

• The Immortal Hour
• Bethlehem
• The Queen of Cornwall
• Alkestis
• Symphony No 1, "Oliver Cromwell"
• Symphony No 2, Deidre
• Symphony No 3 in B minor
• Oboe Concerto No 1
• Oboe Quartet No 1
• String Quartet in A
• String Quartet in G
• Flute Concerto
• Oboe Concerto No 1
• String Concerto
• Trumpet Concerto
• Midnight
• A selection of songs

References

• BARBER, Richard "King Arthur in Music", Boydell & Brewer, 1993
• HURD, Michael "Rutland Boughton and the Glastonbury Festivals", OUP 1993
• MANCOFF, Debra N "The Arthurian Revival - Essays on Form, Tradition and Transformation", Garland Publishing Ltd, 1992

Quotations about Boughton

"The Immortal Hour is a work of genius" - Edward Elgar, 1924

External links

• The Rutland Boughton Music Trust
• Ian Boughton, Administrator & Librarian
• Paul Adrian Rooke, Music Advisor
• King Arthur in Music