Hugh the Drover

I have often walked past this church just along the road, walking in a westerly direction, from the Royal College of Music.

It was built in 1901 replacing the chapel of a leper hospital built in 1609. Yesterday evening I walked in. This part of London is well served for opera lovers: Opera Holland Park, The Royal College of Music and The Royal Albert Hall. Now I have belatedly discovered the church is home to the New London Opera Group, an amateur company founded in 2003.

I went to see a semi-staged production of Hugh the Drover composed by Ralph Vaughan Williams, that had its premiere down the road at the RCM in 1924.The programme notes give a flavour of the opera.

”The operatic canon has a very broad range of inspirations from history, myth and literature to cartoon strips. However Hugh the Drover arose from a letter that Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote to the editor of the Times Literary Supplement in 1910 saying that ‘I want to set a prize fight to music’ and asking if a librettist might be found … The composer was very keen to make the piece as ‘English’ as possible and ‘folk-song-y in character’.

The plot and setting are very redolent of Thomas Hardy – the west of England and Napoleonic period. The invasion threat and spy terror that act as the background to the opera also buy in to the ‘invasion literature’ genre that was hugely popular in Britain in the years before the Great War, notably with Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands (1903).

… Sadly, Hugh the Drover has never secured a regular place in the British operatic canon and was subsequently overshadowed by the arrival of Britten’s postwar operas. This is a shame, as the opera’s heartfelt simplicity makes it a charming and very accessible addition to the repertoire.”

It was as advertised and I enjoyed it immensely. However, it was my first evening outing since leaving hospital and I found the church cold, although I was wearing a thick jumper, and quilted gilet and coat. Well, that’s my excuse for leaving in the Interval after a lovely hour of music and a well choreographed prize fight. It was an evening of firsts: going inside the church, a Vaughan Williams opera and an operatic prize fight. I will be keeping an eye on newLOG’s website for future productions.