The last of Ralph Vaughan Williams' five operas, The Pilgrim's Progress embraces a greater breadth of his musical style than any other work in his oeuvre. Based on the spiritual tract by John Bunyan (1628 - 1688), the opera depicts the journey of a Pilgrim to salvation—led by the Evangelist to the Pilgrim's Way, the man moves through the House Beautiful and then is presented with the challenge of the King's Highway. As an armored knight, he defeats a monster but is wounded; healed by two heavenly intercessors, he continues on his way, confronting the temptations of the flesh offered at Vanity Fair by Madam Bubble and Madam Wanton. When he rejects them, the Pilgrim is put on trial and imprisoned. He resists the invitation to despair and is freed, and continues on his journey, first to the Delectable Mountains and then to the Heavenly City and salavation.

The opera's source was close to his heart, and Vaughan Williams pursued the composition of The Pilgrim's Progress over the longest period of any of his works—45 years elapsed from the point in 1906 when he first sketched out the work to the premiere of the finished opera in 1951. The combination of his love of the material, and the length of time over which he wrote it, effectively made The Pilgrim's Progress a defining work for Vaughan Williams—a coherent "time-lapse" snapshot of his music. In the years 1906—1951, Vaughan Williams moved from a musical style deeply influenced by English folk song and hymn tunes, and rooted in a late-Romantic melodic opulence, through to a leaner, modernistic sound. Virtually every major work that he composed along the way is reflected somewhere in The Pilgrim's Progress. The Symphony No. 5 in D Major, which shares the greatest musical content with The Pilgrim's Progress, is most often cited, but one will find passages that are echoed in numerous other works.

Act I bears a resemblance to the lyrical, melodic passages from first and third movements of the Fifth Symphony, while the music for wordless chorus and orchestra preceding "The Arming of the Pilgrim" at Act II, scene 1, could be direct quotations from the Sinfonia Antarctica, composed during 1949 - 1952. The Vanity Fair sequence in Act III, by contrast, seems derived from elements of the scherzo of Symphony No. 6, while the lyrical Act IV is highlighted by the "Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains," the pastorale that he first composed in the 1920s, and the Pilgrim's entry into the Celestial City recalls the composer's own Fantasia On A Theme Of Thomas Tallis, from 1910. Other passages seem to have grown out of the same big-tuned late Victorian fountain whence came the composer's Sea Symphony (Symphony No. 1), from the first decade of the twentieth century. Amid its mix of grandeur and lyricism, the opera at times almost seems like the composer's own pastiche of his work, thus making it essential listening for his devotees.

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