THE LETTERS OF RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS

[14 July 1902]

Dear Miss Broadwood

Thank you so very much for your very kind card.  I expect you know yourself what a great pleasure it is to receive praise from those whose opinion you value.  I did go to ‘Everyman’;¹ I thought it most beautiful; however if my epilogue represents my impressions of it, it must have been prophetically.
I’m afraid a good deal of the last movement does not ‘come off’.  I am going to try and pull it together a bit.²
Yours very truly

R. Vaughan Williams

1. Possibly the 15th-century morality play.
2. The last paragraph refers to Heroic Elegy and Triumphal Epilogue, which VW revised in August and September 1902. Lucy Broadwood attended a rehearsal performance of Heroic Elegy and Triumphal Epilogue at the Royal College of Music, three days earlier than postmark, on 11 July 1902. See Dorothy de Val, In Search of Song: The Life and Times of Lucy Broadwood (Ashgate, 2011), p.85 (Broadwood’s diary entry itself describes it as a “rehearsal”).