Ask people about Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose 150th birthday this year, and you’ll be told he’s arguably Britain’s favorite composer or a parochial embarrassment whose music sounds like “a cow looking over of a door” (to quote one critic). ). Both judgments tend to be based on just two pieces: Fantasy on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and The Lark Ascending, which have appeared at or near the top of Classic FM’s Hall of Fame poll for 20 years. In 1958, in the last year of his life, he was undoubtedly the grand old man of English music, but his last major work, the ninth symphony, a masterpiece in my opinion, was canceled called by many critics as old hat.
Vaughan Williams, whose 150th birthday we celebrate this year, has always been in fashion and out of style. Many listeners have an “a-ha” moment, either of enlightenment or rejection. Mine, the first, took place listening to his fifth symphony. Written during the dark days of 1942, it left its audience speechless, tearful and grateful for its message of peace and hope. But I knew none of this when, a blank-slate teenager, I popped the needle on the LP and within seconds – a low hum on the strings, two visionary horns, some dreamy violins – I was hooked. This won’t make much sense if you haven’t heard it. So, take a moment out of your busy day. If the first minute of the symphony isn’t your thing, listen to the last, a wordless hallelujah like the one heard at the gates of heaven. If you’re still not charmed, read on. There are many aspects to Vaughan Williams, as I quickly found.
“He witnessed things of which he was never to speak, except perhaps in music”… Vaughan Williams serving in the Field Ambulance in 1915. Photograph: Vaughan Williams Charitable Trust
The course of my love did not go well. I grew impatient with the Pastoral Symphony (No. 3), staring into the empty eyes of that cow, and then fled in fright from the fourth Symphony which assaulted my tender ears. I feel them differently now. The Pastoral is a requiem for the young people lost in the First World War, some of them friends and students of the composer. It was conceived on long, quiet evenings in northern France as the sun set over the battlefields where Vaughan Williams was an ambulance driver. He witnessed things, like so many, that he was never supposed to talk about, except maybe in music. The Fourth Symphony I hear now as an expression of post-war rage, dissonant from first to last, a gateway to hell that might appeal to my previously unimpressed reader.
He confessed that he himself sometimes did not know whether he had composed a piece or simply remembered it… The Tallis Fantasia sounds as if the musicians are reading not sheet music but runes carved into the rock.
Vaughan Williams was slow to find his own musical voice. In his student days, England still looked to Germany for his musical models – Mendelssohn and Brahms – so it was to the despair of his harmony teacher when sample minuets came out of fashion. (Think Fred Astaire in clogs.) From his 30s, however, he became a one-man musical institution. He edited the Anglican hymnbook The English Hymnal, toured the country’s pubs collecting folk songs, was active in the English Folk Dance Society, although he was something of a galumpher himself, and conducted amateur choirs and professional orchestras with passion and the occasional burst of humor. As World War II drew to a close, he was the one the authorities turned to for “A Song of Thanksgiving,” to be ready for VE Day. And he was a beloved teacher who supported young composers financially and in other practical ways. He once had to lead an orchestra that openly laughed at a young, then unknown Benjamin Britten. Perhaps most importantly, he created what is now the RVW Charitable Trust, which still distributes his royalties to fund new works. Having never had children, these beneficiaries are in fact his musical heirs.
Vaughan Williams was steeped in his country’s literature and art, old and new. He put words by Housman and Kipling, Shakespeare (try Serenade to music from The Merchant of Venice) and Herbert (Five Mystical Songs love has welcomed me, you’ll thank me!), and there’s an opera on Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. The final scene of HG Wells’s Tono-Bungay inspired the atmospheric finale of A London Symphony (“Light after light falls… passes London – passes England”) and that “old hat” ninth symphony be provoked by Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. . You can even hear the eight o’clock chimes that mark the moment of Tess’s execution.
“A low hum on the strings, two visionary horns, some dreamy violins… I was hooked.” Director Andrew Manze. Photograph: Hiroyuki Ito/Getty Images
The setting and music of Job, a masque for dancing (not a ballet, he did not like “too developed old men”) was based heavily on William Blake’s illustrations in the Book of Job, and the famous Tallis Fantasia is Gothic architecture. in music Vaughan Williams confessed that he himself sometimes did not know whether he had composed a piece or simply remembered it. He compared the process to seeing Stonehenge, New York or Niagara Falls for the first time: it was as if he already knew them. The Tallis Fantasia sounds as if the musicians are reading not sheet music but runes carved into the rock.
For some, however, Vaughan Williams’ Englishness itself may be a barrier to appreciation. I’ve been lucky enough to perform his music outside of the UK and see him play and speak to musicians and audiences who know nothing of his cultural roots. The most common reaction to hearing one of the symphonies is a kind of perplexed desire for more: how many of these are there? Why didn’t we know them already? And I owe Vaughan Williams a debt of gratitude. Ten years ago, the North German Radio Philharmonic asked me to become its chief conductor as a direct result of a performance of the Sixth Symphony, a devastating piece completed shortly after the Second World War. Listen to its post-apocalypse finale, 10 minutes of static, silent music (and spare a thought for the orchestras playing this difficult piece).
Exploring a deep cultural fiction… Vaughan Williams, photographed in 1903. Photograph: Vaughan Williams Charitable Trust
The cultural roots are deep and ancient. Dig deep enough, as Vaughan Williams did, and you’ll find the music’s roots intertwined, shared even with other cultures, in a foundation of pentatonics, old fashions, hymns, chorales, and folk dance. Perhaps that is why Vaughan Williams had so much respect for Sibelius, the great Finnish composer to whom he dedicated that wonderful fifth symphony “without permission”. Their music sounds and feels totally different, but they were both exploiting the same deep cultural fiction. And that is why I believe that the music of Vaughan Williams has endured in our esteem and will do so for a long time, even if fashions come and go. Calling the Ninth Symphony “old hat” was intended as an insult. However, I hear the piece as the summation of a life’s work, perhaps tired, but deservedly so after such a long and rich creativity.
Andrew Manze conducts the BBC National Orchestra of Wales in Vaughan William’s First Symphony on July 27 at London’s Royal Albert Hall. The music of Vaughan Williams is celebrated during this year’s Proms season.