RUTLAND BOUGHTON

Rutland Boughton (1878-1960) was the son of a grocer of Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. He showed exceptional talent at an early age and studied briefly at the Royal College of Music, but finances caused him to abandon the RCM after only one year. Although he was substantially self-taught, he had opportunity to study with Charles Villiers Stanford and Walford Davies. He was good friends with Gustav Holst, Granville Bantock, Edward Elgar, Thomas Beecham and George Bernard Shaw. Boughton’s output included three symphonies, several concertos, part-songs, songs, and chamber music but he is primarily known as a composer of opera and the principal English advocate of Richard Wagner’s theories of music drama. Boughton set out to create a new form of opera he called “choral drama”. He was enamored with Arthurian legends and created an “Arthurian Cycle” of operas. 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. However, it never developed. His Bethlehem (1915) is based on the Coventry Nativity Play and is noted for its choral arrangements of traditional Christmas carols. The work became very popular with choral societies worldwide. Arthurian legends, narrative folk-tales or folk songs were often the basis for his part-songs. Some were titled “Choral Variations,” especially those with texts in strophic form, sometimes resulting with a slightly more expansive part-song.

All are mixed chorus; some contain divisi.