On the afternoon of Thursday 15 August 1912, Ralph Vaughan Williams talked to an audience of summer-school students in the Memorial Lecture Room that was part of the handsome and still-surviving scene-dock building close to the old Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon. His subject was traditional folk-music and dance. Intelligent interest in such things, he stressed, was not a matter of backward-looking antiquarianism or an attempt to re-create the past, for (as a journalist from the Birmingham Post reported him as saying) ‘the past was done with; we had to live on in the present and for the future, although we could take from the past whatever had been good in it’.

Those quoted words could serve as epigraph to the eight essays on musical and theatrical arts in early twentieth-century England (detailed case-studies in the main) that I have brought together here. Not that the essays as a group develop a single coherent theme or argument; but in part at least each looks at artistic activity which at one and the same time was characteristic of its age, was concerned in one way or another to point towards the future, and was keen to enlist help from good things in the past so as to do so. The field the essays explore is ‘music-theatre’ in the broad sense of music linked with drama in opera houses and playhouses, recital rooms and concert halls, pageant meadows, public gardens and village greens.