Ask most listeners, and even many musicians, what opera has received the greatest number of consecutive performances in a single production, and some may scratch their heads, pondering Puccini's La Boheme, he most celebrated works of Verdi, or Wagner, or anyone else that you're likely to name.

The answer is The Immortal Hour by Rutland Boughton.

The what, by whom?

The Immortal Hour, composed in the early 1920's, ran for 216 consecutive performances in London beginning in October of 1922, and an additional 160 consecutive revival performances from November of 1923, and was further revived in 1926 and 1932. Following this triumph, however, and despite his authorship of several song cycles and a trio of symphonies, Boughton had faded into obscurity by the middle of the 1940's, and was largely forgotten even in England until the end of the 1980's.

Rutland Boughton was born in Aylesbury in 1878, the son of an unsuccessful, impoverished grocer. He was never able to study music as a boy, despite his obvious talent in that area, and it wasn't until 1892, when he was apprenticed to a concert agency in London that Boughton was able to make anything resembling an entry into the field of music. As a self-taught musician, he had boundless confidence, and his work attracted sufficient interest and sympathy so that by 1901 friends and supporters were able to raise a small amount of money to send him to the Royal College of Music, where he at last had the chance for some formal study, under Sir Charles Villiers Stanford and Sir Walford Davies. The next four years were marred by dire poverty, but he persevered, and in 1905 was offered a faculty position at the Midland Institute of Music in Birmingham.

Finally settled into a music position that offered some financial and professional stability, Boughton overcame the impoverishment of his education, blossoming not only as a composer but also as a conductor and teacher, especially where singing in general and choral music in particular were concerned. He immersed himself in Wagner's operas, absorbing all that he could from their composition. Additionally, he became a noted philosophical thinker, inspired by the idealistic nineteenth century socialism of William Morris.

Boughton set himself to a task over the next several years that had bedeviled his fellow countrymen for decades, even centuries, of finding a uniquely English approach to opera. There was relatively little inspiration in this work to be found in the musical world of London--where the notion of English opera of any kind had failed ever to take root--and at one point he began proposing the founding of an artistic commune, as an alternative. His operatic aspirations grew, and, still heavily influenced by Wagner, he gradually evolved a form that he referred to as "Choral Drama."

Boughton realized part of his dream during the summer of 1914 with the first Glastonbury Festival, an artistic gathering built around local performing talent and his personal friends, performing in an intimate setting with only a piano accompaniment. It was during this festival that The Immortal Hour, adapted from a 1900 verse drama by Celtic revivalist William Sharp (1855-1905), writing as Fiona Macleod, that he'd begun in 1910, received its first public performances.

He continued the festival each season, every year, until 1926, and wrote seven musical dramas for them, of which only The Immortal Hour seemed to find an audience beyond those immediately in attendance. In 1921, it was presented in Birmingham to such success and enthusiasm, that it was later brought to London where, at the Regent Theatre, beginning on October 23, 1922, it received 216 consecutive performances, a record for any opera anywhere. It was revived the following year with another 160 performances, and there were additional revivals in 1926 and 1932, as people attended repeatedly, entranced by its beautiful melodies and its mysterious, mystical, magical Celtic setting, filled with Druids, Bards, warriors, maidens, and Elemental Spirits.

Boughton's career after The Immortal Hour was something of an anti-climax. The end of the Glastonbury Festivals in 1927 cost him an important vehicle for his work, although he did eventually organize a form of the kind of self-sustaining artistic community he'd proposed before the First World War. He continued conducting and lecturing, on politics as well as music, and organized new festivals in the 1930's, presenting new works that failed to find a audiences, while the festivals themselves proved impossible to sustain. During the mid-1930's, he also began writing instrumental works of various kinds, including a first oboe concerto of great beauty, and other works for flute, strings, and trumpet, as well as a trio of symphonies. His daily life was one of impoverishment, however--he was unable to attend the 1937 premiere of the Oboe Concerto No. 1, for, according to scholar Michael Hurd, his income for the year was barely £100 (about $500 American, enough to survive on in those Depression years, but not much more), and he could afford to travel to Oxford for the performance.

World War II saw him turn once again to a long cherished project, a group of five musical drama settings of the Arthurian legends, which he completed in 1945. He gave up any active involvement in music beyond that point, and lived the last 15 years of his life in quiet, contented anonymity, having fulfilled the goals of his lifetime and done his best in the service of the causes--music, specifically English opera, and Socialism--closest to his heart. Boughton died on January 25, 1960, at the age of 82.

Much of his music and even his name had passed from memory by then, and both were pushed even further into the recesses of the collective English musical consciousness in the decades that followed, as post-romantic relics of the between-war years. Then in the late 1980's, a slow rediscovery began taking place, as Boughton's works, along with those of such forgotten English composers as Granville Bantock, and forgotten works of such composers as Sir Arnold Bax and Frank Bridge, began receiving performances. There can hardly be said to have been a Rutland Boughton revival in the years since, but The Immortal Hour has been performed and is available on compact disc, and several of his symphonies and other concert works are now represented as well. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi