First World War<\/a><\/strong> looming, there wasn\u2019t enough to build. The three forged ahead nonetheless, eagerly involving locals alongside professional artists, both enhancing their populist vision and saving money.<\/span><\/p>\nWhen was the first Glastonbury Festival?<\/h2>\n
In August 1914 they launched the first festival programme, offering plays, ballets, children\u2019s operas and concerts, but only excerpts f<\/span>rom the uncompleted Arthurian operas. Instead, Boughton premiered what would prove his most significant music-drama, The Immortal Hour<\/i>. Lacking the theatre, they held performances in Glastonbury\u2019s small <\/span>Assembly Rooms, with a grand piano instead of an orchestra and a chorus and staff drawn mostly from locals. Walshe designed striking costumes but, unable to afford sets, she created a concept which attracted widespread attention, using the chorus as \u2018living scenery\u2019, miming and dancing images such as waves breaking on castle walls. Despite hitches \u2013 not least Boughton\u2019s affair with Irene Lemon, singing the heroine Etain, and having to replace one singer himself \u2013 the Festival was a success.<\/span><\/p>\nOver the next few years, despite war constraints and eternal fundraising, an even more ambitious programme developed, with Easter festivals, summer schools, celebrity lectures, offshoots in Bristol and London and provincial touring performances. Neither theatre nor commune ever materialised, but the Festival acquired a small orchestra and a resident quartet, and produced a startling range of works, from operas by Edgar Bainton and Clarence Raybould to Gluck and Wagner. Dance, by Isadora Duncan disciples Margaret Morris and Penelope Spencer, also featured, and dramas poetic and otherwise. Boughton contributed everything from his Arthurian operas to settings of Marie Stopes\u2019s Japanese Noh play translations, (foreshadowing Britten and Curlew River<\/i>), songs, choral works, and the mystery-play Bethlehem<\/i>. <\/span><\/p>\nThere was nothing else like it in Britain, and never really had been \u2013 a vivid, exciting experimental nexus to compete with European institutions. Performances were reported in national papers. Audiences made pilgrimages from London and all over the country. Shaw compared it favourably to Bayreuth. Many supporters, though, like Vaughan Williams and Holst, still felt it was too amateurish. Certainly conditions were rough and ready: many outdoor performances, then as now, foundered in rain and mud; productions were rather hit and miss, as when Christina designed some masks which nearly asphyxiated the exhausted chorus, much to Shaw\u2019s amusement; Gwen Ffrancon-Davies, now a leading singer-actress, remembered being awarded the only solo dressing-room \u2013 a tiny understairs broom cupboard, candlelit because the Assembly Rooms had no electricity.<\/span><\/p>\nOther tensions rapidly developed. Local playwright Alice Buckton tried to start her own festival. Boughton, dissatisfied with Buckley, drew closer to Shaw, who despised Buckley; he died tragically young at war\u2019s end. Boughton began yet another affair, this time with teenage pupil Kathleen Davis, causing tremendous distress to Christina and their friends. In 1917, at 38, he was called up for two years, becoming the new-born RAF\u2019s first bandmaster, while Christina kept the Festival going. But it was about to launch a startling success.<\/span><\/p>\nThe Immortal Hour<\/i>, the epitome of \u2018Celtic Twilight\u2019, had come to embody Glastonbury\u2019s idealistic, quasi-mystical ambience. Elgar called it \u2018a work of genius\u2019; Dame Ethel Smyth was \u2018enchanted by it\u2019, and Shaw and any\nnumber of other musical luminaries praised it. Vaughan Williams said that in any other country \u2018it would have been in the repertoire years ago\u2019. From a play by one \u2018Fiona Macleod\u2019 (actually a rather weird Glasgow critic called William Sharp) it retells an old Gaelic legend of the Sidhe \u2013 beautiful but perilous superhumans, the model for Tolkien\u2019s elves. Deluded by Dalua, god of dreams and madness, the poet-king Eochaid marries the mysterious waif Etain. She, though, is the lost wife of the Sidhe lord Midir, who draws her back, to Eochaid\u2019s ruin, with ardent singing: the famous (and misnamed) \u2018Faerie Song\u2019. This Pell\u00e9as-<\/i>like story inspired Boughton to his finest atmospheric and melodic music, influenced, like Bantock, by Marjorie Kennedy-Fraser\u2019s Hebridean song collections. In 1921 the great actor-manager Sir Barry Jackson mounted the Hour <\/i>in Birmingham and then London, with Gwen Ffrancon-Davies as Etain. Unexpectedly it became a runaway success, casting a Tolkienesque spell that drew people back to see it again and again. The Hour <\/i>still holds the record for continuous opera performances \u2013 221, with 160 the next year \u2013 as well as touring, and aroused interest abroad; the \u2018Faerie Song\u2019 <\/i>was performed everywhere. It made Boughton a national celebrity, relatively prosperous, and put Glastonbury firmly on the map. Characteristically, its upper-class popularity appalled him.<\/span><\/p>\nSuccess spurred Boughton to produce still more Glastonbury operas, continuing the Arthurian cycle and adding The Queen of Cornwall, <\/i>by Thomas Hardy no less, and Alkestis,<\/i> which was successfully taken up by Covent Garden. Many featured Kathleen, for whom, after contemplating a m\u00e9nage \u00e0 trois<\/i>, he eventually broke with Christina, alienating backers such as the shoe-manufacturing Clark family. Nevertheless Christina remained at Glastonbury. By 1926, though always financially straitened, it had mounted over 350 staged works, over 100 concerts and recitals, and many other events. So how could something so alive disappear so thoroughly?<\/span><\/p>\nWhat happened to the original Glastonbury Festival?<\/h2>\n
Boughton, unfortunately, was growing touchy at what he saw as his own exploitation, even somewhat paranoid. Like many contemporaries, he became naively attracted by the Soviet revolution. In 1926 the Glastonbury company staged vital fund-raising London performances of Bethlehem<\/i>. Without consulting his fellow directors Boughton produced it with Joseph and Mary as striking miners and Herod as a caricature top-hatted capitalist. The concept, endorsed by GK Chesterton and others, was harmless enough \u2013 except that Boughton also depicted British bobbies and British troops marching off to massacre the Innocents. So soon after the First World War this caused enormous offence even with liberal London audiences. And so Bethlehem<\/i> made a disastrous loss. The other directors duly resigned; the Glastonbury townsfolk withdrew their support. The Festival was abandoned.<\/span><\/p>\nBoughton, with his now extensive family, retired unrepentant to a Gloucestershire smallholding bought for him by a female admirer, where he lived on, still compulsively composing, writing and proposing new festivals, until his death in 1960. But although his symphonies and other works were supported by Vaughan Williams, Arthur Bliss and others, he was increasingly forgotten. <\/span>The Immortal Hour<\/i><\/span> became relegated to wretched amateur performances, its \u2018Faerie Song\u2019 <\/i>to twee popular tenors and schoolgirls. Boughton\u2019s politics are sometimes blamed; he remained fanatically pro-Soviet until painfully disillusioned by the 1956 Hungarian revolt. However, many other fellow-travellers fared better. His prickliness didn\u2019t help. In the words of his biographer Michael Hurd, he \u2018had dug his own grave, and would devote the next few years to pulling in the earth on top of himself\u2019, antagonising even those well disposed to him, until it became easy to forget his Glastonbury accomplishments and write him off as a crank. Eventually, in great need, he was awarded a modest Civil List pension. His children became accomplished musicians, including the famous oboist Joy Boughton. <\/span><\/p>\nUltimately, it was Glastonbury\u2019s whole fey-folksiness which came to seem impossibly quaint, parochial and old-fashioned in the post-war era. Not altogether unfairly; some of its music is remarkably vapid. Nevertheless recent Boughton recordings, including songs, symphonies and Bethlehem<\/i>, make a striking impression. Above all, The Immortal Hour, <\/i>static and stylised as it seems, still conjures up something of that original, long-forgotten excitement: the authentic Glastonbury magic.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/body><\/html>\n
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