A Cotswold Romance is a cantata adaptation of Vaughan Williams's 'ballad-opera' Hugh the Drover highlighting the chorus. Writing to his librettist, the journalist Harold Child, in 1910, he said: “I have an idea for an opera written to real English words, with a certain amount of real English music”. This idea of vernacular is carried our in Elgar’s “From the Bavarian Highlands” which consists of six poems, written by his wife Alice, depicting a place they had visited on holiday in southern Germany.
