There is a vision of heaven near the end of The Pilgrim's Progress, Ralph Vaughan Williams's operatic ‘morality founded on John Bunyan's allegory of the same name’. Throughout the work, Pilgrim the hero has been traveling towards the Celestial City on Mount Zion, and now we see him going up to its golden gates. As he is welcomed there, the ‘Holy—Holy—Holies’ of Heavenly Beings (‘grouped in circles’, the stage direction tells us, ‘like a mediaeval Italian picture’) blend with a fortissimo orchestral reprise of ‘York’, the Puritan hymn-tune that had rather more quietly begun the opera. The blending makes for the loudest music we have heard in about forty-five minutes, and the last time there was anything of comparable volume it went with a diabolical ‘march to the scaffold’ as the people of Vanity Fair prepared to fling Pilgrim into Lord Hate-Good's dungeon. Now by contrast the noise is joyful, affirmative, luminous, exhilarating.

So is the Zion scene the opera's consummation? Of course yes, in a sense. Pilgrim has made it to the gates and is being resoundingly welcomed; what could be more consummating than that? Yet there are a couple of strangenesses here. First, though the scene celebrates the hero's arrival, he doesn't get to utter a note in it. Bunyan's original narrative at this point has him and his companion Hopeful singing ‘Blessing, Honour, Glory, and Power be unto Him that sitteth upon the Throne’, but Vaughan Williams gives these words to one of the Heavenly Beings and leaves Pilgrim with none.