Delius's Operas

An otherwise valuable chapter in a German text-book on Musical Form is erroneously entitled “Logic and Coherence in Music,” for it deals only with treatments of motives and methods of reference; they alone cannot ensure logic and coherence, otherwise the sentence “Every thirty trees through a tuba are sweeter than a door” would be as logical and coherent as “Any two sides of a triangle are greater than a third” grammatically the sentences are identical. A story is told of Vaughan Williams's asking a candidate at Cambridge: “What do you mean by development?” After a silence, the answer was: “I don't really know,” to which R.V.W. rejoined: “Neither do I”! That motive reference is one important means of unifying an act or a whole opera, that it often offers a clue to the deeper integrity that defies analysis, and that it probably exists, used unconsciously or too subtly to be recognised, in works avoided by analysts, I do not deny. (It certainly exists in Boris Godunoff, yet Moussorgsky was at pains to avoid classical development, or Wagnerian Leitmotive machinery, or anything he considered a German stylization).