ABSTRACT
Interest in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British music has undergone something of a recrudescence since the mid-1980s, and as a result significant studies of various kinds have been published. Jeremy Dibble's exhaustive biography was the first reappraisal of Parry since the two-volume treatment by Charles Graves. Bernard Benoliel's examination of Parry and his music presented, in his words, "a critique of Parry fundamentally at odds" with Dibble and Graves. By 1902 Parry felt he had exhausted the manifold traditional forms for chorus and orchestra he had been working with for over twenty years. The Vision of Life, the fifth work in this series, was intended as Parry's metaphysical testament. Elgar, who was at the Cardiff Festival to conduct The Kingdom, was right when he concluded that The Vision of Life was "too strong for the Church". In view of the fact that so many of Parry's manuscripts survive, it is possible to examine the autographs of The Vision of Life.
