THE LETTERS OF RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS

The White Gates
Dorking

August 26th [1951]

Dictated to UW.

Dear Cedric

I feel ashamed of myself that I have not answered your kind invitation, nor any of the shower of delightful postcards which you and your little company sent me from abroad. I was much interested in your article in the Times, which I spotted as being by you, I am not at all sure that I want P.P.¹  done à la Wieland.² From the accounts I have read, no one seems able to see or hear.

Yrs   R. Vaughan Williams

1. Pilgrim’s Progress.
2. The Times article on 20 August was about productions of Wagner by Herr Wieland Wagner. The article concluded:
“The French impressionist painters, to whom Herr Wieland Wagner confesses his indebtedness, hardly seem suitable models for the dramas of his ancestor. Yet Parsifal, played throughout behind a veil, achieved a dreamlike effect of remoteness in time and space which seemed wholly consonant with its creator’s conception, however greatly he would have disapproved of it. In general, it is evident that Herr Wieland Wagner believes that economy in stage presentation is no hindrance to intelligent appreciation; even the costumes of the gods were of a severely subfusc austerity, and helmets, once the headgear de rigueur of The Ring, were discarded. It would be interesting to see what he could do with Vaughan Williams’s Pilgrim’s Progress.”