Mayor of Casterbridge
Sheet Music

Orchestra

SKU: PE.PREPME13S

Composed by Ralph Vaughan Williams. This edition: softcover. Full Scores. The Massey University Music Edition. Study score. Composed 1950. 32 pages. Duration 00:06:00. Edition Peters #PREPME13S. Published by Edition Peters (PE.PREPME13S).

ISBN 9790674520393. A4+ inches.

Published for the first time, The Mayor of Casterbridge is the incidental music created for the 1950 BBC radio dramatization of Thomas Hardy’s novel by the same name. Editor Nathaniel Lew prepared this publication from Ralph Vaughan Williams’ original manuscripts to a format that is clear for both scholars and performers. In the preface, Lews provides a functional history of the work by examining in detail the orchestral phrasing throughout the three sections in relation to the narrative journey of the script.

Subtitled ‘The Life and Death of A Man of Character’, The Mayor of Casterbridge tells the tale of Henchard, a strong man who focuses heavily on his past misdeeds and evidently becomes the creator of his own demise. The music was serialised into ten weekly episodes, however little documentary evidence remains of the radio publication. As Lew “Most useful to our understanding of the music are the ‘Programme as Broadcast’ records. Unfortunately, the BBC assigned a single code to all of Vaughan William's scores (DBS 1972). And the broadcast records identify excerpts from this recording only by their duration, with no indication of which passages where used where. Most episodes appear to use one or two excerpts, with duration ranging from twenty-five seconds to over three minutes, but even his is unclear: where there is only a single duration listed, it may represent the combined duration of several excerpts. We are left with an enigma: some fine music, but little sense of how it fits with the script, and several points in the script with no suitable music at all.”