Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedications
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Musical Examples
- Preface with Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- INTRODUCTION
- 1 Books to Make a Traveller of Thee: Pilgrims, Vagabonds and the Monodramas of Vaughan Williams
- 2 A Quarry for Profitable Working: Staging the Masques of Ben Jonson in London and Stratford-upon-Avon, 1903–1912
- 3 The Edens of Reginald Buckley: Temples and Tetralogies at Bayreuth, Stratford and Glastonbury
- 4 ‘One of the Greatest Composers the World has ever seen’: Vaughan Williams and the Purcell Revival
- 5 ‘What About an English Ballet?’ Edward Gordon Craig, Music-Theatre and Cupid and Psyche
- 6 Alice Shortcake, Jenny Pluckpears and the Stratford-Upon-Avon Connections of Sir John in Love
- 7 Bringing in the May: Alice Gomme, Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams at the Crystal Palace
- 8 Vaughan Williams, the Romany Ryes and the Cambridge Ritualists
- APPENDICES
- SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
- INDEX OF NAMES
- INDEX OF TOPICS
8 - Vaughan Williams, the Romany Ryes and the Cambridge Ritualists
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedications
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Musical Examples
- Preface with Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- INTRODUCTION
- 1 Books to Make a Traveller of Thee: Pilgrims, Vagabonds and the Monodramas of Vaughan Williams
- 2 A Quarry for Profitable Working: Staging the Masques of Ben Jonson in London and Stratford-upon-Avon, 1903–1912
- 3 The Edens of Reginald Buckley: Temples and Tetralogies at Bayreuth, Stratford and Glastonbury
- 4 ‘One of the Greatest Composers the World has ever seen’: Vaughan Williams and the Purcell Revival
- 5 ‘What About an English Ballet?’ Edward Gordon Craig, Music-Theatre and Cupid and Psyche
- 6 Alice Shortcake, Jenny Pluckpears and the Stratford-Upon-Avon Connections of Sir John in Love
- 7 Bringing in the May: Alice Gomme, Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams at the Crystal Palace
- 8 Vaughan Williams, the Romany Ryes and the Cambridge Ritualists
- APPENDICES
- SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
- INDEX OF NAMES
- INDEX OF TOPICS
Summary
Did Vaughan Williams ever take to the open road, Gypsy-fashion? Did a friend ever make him the kind of offer a famous character in Kenneth Grahame makes two of his friends?
He led the way to the stable-yard […] and there, drawn out of the coach-house into the open, they saw a gipsy caravan, shining with newness, painted a canary-yellow picked out with green, and red wheels. ‘There you are! cried the Toad.’ […] ‘There's real life for you, embodied in that little cart. The open road, the dusty highway, the heath, the common, the hedgerows, the rolling downs! Camps, villages, towns, cities! […] The whole world before you, and a horizon that's always changing!’
The Wind in the Willows was published in 1908, and it's clear that with the caravan phase of Mr Toad's enthusiasms—it comes between his river-boat and motor-car phases—Grahame is making very gentle fun of a cult which by then was in full swing. ‘Gypsophilia’ one might call it (creating an abstract noun from the adjective ‘gypsophile’ that was current among members of the Gypsy Lore Society in the first half of the twentieth century): the late Victorian and Edwardian idealisation and rather selective emulation of the life of the Gypsy Traveller, one element in the age's particular penchant for rural places, spaces and faces. Grahame has Mr Toad borrow the Gypsophile language of the kind of turn-of-the-century romance that featured thrilling, touching, inspiring encounters between picturesque Gypsies—’full-’, ‘pure-’ and ‘true-blooded’ ones if at all possible—and gentile folk (‘Gorgios’ in Romany).
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- Masques, Mayings and Music-DramasVaughan Williams and the Early Twentieth-Century Stage, pp. 304 - 358Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2014