AAsk people about Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose 150th birthday we’re celebrating this year, and they might tell you he’s either Britain’s favorite songwriter or a parochial embarrassment whose music sounds like “a cow looking over a gate” (to quote a critic). Both trials are generally based on just two pieces: Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis Y The rising lark, which have appeared at or near the top of the Classic FM Hall of Fame poll for 20 years. In 1958, in the last year of his life, he was unquestionably the great old man of English music, but his last great work, the Ninth Symphony, in my opinion a masterpiece, was dismissed by many critics as a old hat.
Vaughan Williams, whose 150th anniversary we celebrate this year, has always been in and out of style. Many listeners have an “aha” 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 audiences gasping, tearful, and appreciative of his message of peace and hope. But I knew none of this when, being an inexperienced teenager, I put the needle on the LP and in a matter of seconds: a low hum on the strings, two visionary trumpets, dreamy violins – I got hooked. That won’t make much sense unless you’ve heard it. So take a moment out of your busy day. If the first minute of the symphony is not your thing, listen until the last, a mute hallelujah like the one heard at the gates of heaven. If you’re still not enchanted, read on. There are many sides to Vaughan Williams, as I quickly discovered.
The course of my love did not run smoothly. I got impatient with him Pastoral Symphony (No. 3), looking into the vacant eyes of that cow, and then fled in fright from the fourth Symphony that assailed my tender ears. I hear 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 afternoons in northern France as the sun set over the battlefields where Vaughan Williams worked as an ambulance driver. He witnessed things, as many did, that he would never speak of, except perhaps in music. The fourth symphony I hear now as an expression of post-war rage, dissonant from beginning to end, a hellish gate that might draw in my previously unimpressed reader.
Vaughan Williams was slow to find his own musical voice. In his student days, England still looked to Germany for the musical models of him, Mendelssohn and Brahms, so it was his harmony teacher’s despair when sample minuets came to light. (Think Fred Astaire in clogs.) However, from the age of 30, it evolved into a one-man musical institution. He edited the Anglican hymnal The English Hymnal, toured country pubs collecting folk songs, was active in the English Folk Dance Society, though something of a galumpher himself, and conducted amateur choirs and professional orchestras with passion and occasional outbursts of temper. . As World War II drew to a close, the authorities turned to him 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 call into action an orchestra that openly laughed at a young, then unknown, Benjamin Britten. Perhaps most importantly, he created what is now the RVW Charitable Trust who still distributes his royalties to finance new works. Having had no children of their own, these beneficiaries are in effect his musical heirs.
English through and through, Vaughan Williams was steeped in the literature and art of his country, old and new. He put words from Housman and Kipling, Shakespeare (try the Serenade to Music from The Merchant of Venice) and Herbert (Five Mystical Songs’s love welcomed me – you will thank me!), and there is a opera on Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. HG Wells’ Tono-Bungay ending scene inspired the atmospheric ending of A London Symphony (“Light after light goes out…London passes – England passes”) and that “old” ninth symphony was sparked by Tess of Hardy’s d’Urbervilles. You can even hear the chimes of eight o’clock that mark the moment of Tess’s execution.
The setting and music of Job, a mask to dance (No a ballet: he disliked “overdeveloped calves”) were closely based on William Blake’s illustrations of the Book of Job, and the hall of the famous Tallis Fantasia is Gothic architecture set to music. Vaughan Williams confessed that he himself sometimes did not know if 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 aren’t reading sheet music but runes carved into rock.
To some, however, Vaughan Williams’s very English character may be a barrier to appreciation. I have been lucky enough to play his music outside of the UK and see how he plays and speaks to musicians and audiences who know nothing of his cultural roots. The most common reaction to listening to one of the symphonies is a kind of bewildered appetite for more: how many of these are there? Why didn’t we know them already? And I owe Vaughan Williams a debt of thanks. Ten years ago, the North German Radio Philharmonic asked me to become their chief conductor as a direct result of performing the Sixth Symphony, a devastating piece that was completed shortly after World War II. Listen to its post-apocalypse ending, 10 minutes of silent, static music (and think of the orchestras playing this incredibly difficult piece).
The cultural roots are deep and ancient. Dig deep enough, as Vaughan Williams did, and you’ll find the music’s roots tangled up, shared even with other cultures, on a foundation of pentatonics, ancient modes, 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”. His music sounds and feels totally different, but they were both exploring the same deep cultural vein. And that’s why I think Vaughan Williams’ music has endured in our estimation and will endure for a long time, even though fads come and go. Calling the 9th Symphony “old hat” was an insult. However, I hear the piece as the summary of a lifetime’s work, sounding tired perhaps, but deservedly so after such a rich and prolonged creativity.