Josef Holbrooke's Cauldron of Annwn and metempsychosis in music

Abstract

Lauded by a number of contemporary critics and fellow musicians as the great hope of English music in the early decades of this century, Josef Holbrooke was an eccentric composer given to monumental conceptions. His operatic trilogy, The Cauldron of Annwn, was based on two distinct Welsh mythological tales, linked by the librettist through the device of metempsychosis or reincarnation. This paper concentrates on the thematic connections between the three operas, The Children of Don, Dylan and Bronwen, to determine the extent to which Holbrooke underwrote musically the convoluted literary connections devised by his librettist.