World Youth Day, the Church’s international gathering for young people, has begun in Krakow. The great festival finds itself in the home city of St John Paul II, whose idea it was in the first place.
I have been watching the opening Mass and wishing I could be there! All the same, how marvellous to be able to watch it and enjoy the atmosphere live over the Internet.
One thing I am determined to know is the name of the composer of the Mass setting. (Any information about this will be gratefully received!) [Update here: the composer is Henryk Jan Botor] There is plenty of health in Poland, if they are writing new music like this. This is the Sanctus:
Also worth a listen are the three hymns sung at Communion: the first, the second and the third.
[Update: as far as I have been able to tell, in spite of my appalling ignorance of the Polish language, the hymns at this opening Mass are as follows: Offertory hymn: Wypłyń na głębię — Jacek Sykulski — ‘Don’t be afraid — put out into the deep’, which I think are words of St John Paul II (It certainly sounds like him…) Communion hymn no. 1: O panie, tyś moim pasterzem — Sr. Imelda (CSSF), J. Kosko. ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’, Psalm 23.
Communion hymn no. 2: Witaj, pokarmie — Paweł Bębenek. Submitted to Google Translate, this comes out as ‘Hello, diet’! — so I assume it would be better rendered as ‘Hail, our sustenance’…
Communion hymn, no. 3: Skosztujcie i zobaczcie— Fr. Dawid Kusz OP. ‘Taste and See’, Psalm 98. Much of the music can also be found here, and the words in the WYD Prayer Book which is downloadable here. See also this post, which has a little more about the Mass setting, which was composed by Henryk Jan Botor.]
Thus the Church flourishes in the face of those who would destroy her, such as the murderers of père Jacques Hamel, assistant priest of St-Etienne-du-Rouvray near Rouen. Having served God quietly in Normandy all his long life, he was martyred today as he celebrated Mass. (Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him; St Stephen, patron of his church and martyr, pray for us; St Denis, patron saint of France and also martyr, pray for France).
Persecutors seem never to realise how unoriginal their actions are. The Church, however, which answers a day of bloodshed with a ‘cri vers Dieu’ (a cry to God), fine and majestic music, a three-hundred-thousand-strong gathering of ‘apôtres de la civilisation de l’amour’ (apostles of the civilisation of love) and the unanswerable Eucharist, wins every time. And endures in Jesus Christ.
All his life Ralph Vaughan Williams’ finger lay on England’s pulse. It is for those works in which he managed to distil particular aspects of the English spirit that he is best known: her landscape in The Lark Ascending or In the Fen Country, her musical inheritance in the Tallis Fantasia, her ordinary people in arrangements of folk-songs, her reserved simplicity of religion or the heady otherworldliness of Shakespeare. Vaughan Williams’ music has a tremendous variety in mood, colour, scale and scope, but it is all somehow distinctively his, and all somehow distinctively English.
Lately I have been venturing cautiously into some of his more difficult and troubling music: his fourth symphony (1935) and his sixth symphony (1948), particularly their first movements. Of Vaughan Williams’ nine symphonies, each of which has its own character, it is these two works which most shocked their first audiences. From the opening of the Fourth it is easy to hear why:
At first it seems like the work of a different man. I would never have thought that music like this would be my cup of tea. Yet I have been listening particularly to this first movement again and again, even though it is hard to swallow. Something has been drawing me back to it, and I think this something is another portrait of England.
Some have said that this music is a reflection of its time, perhaps of the overcast mood in Europe in the 1930s. Vaughan Williams, who was well-known for disliking the reading of such messages or programmes into his work, gave very little away. His most famous comment on the symphony is often paraphrased as ‘I don't know whether I like it, but it’s what I meant'. Neither do I quite know whether I like it, but am beginning to think I know what he means. In spite of the composer’s own reticence, and although I am no musicologist, I think it could be understood, among other things, as depiction of England’s broken heart. After the restrained sorrow and dignified mourning of the third symphony (the misleadingly-named ‘Pastoral’, which is in fact a programmatic depiction of the war-blasted landscape of northern France), here is the deeper grief and the rawer anguish. It is as much a return to the First World War as a prophecy of the second. No wonder it is not easy music. I can hardly stand the opening bars, but am moved and astonished by the inconsolable theme on the violins at 3 minutes and 48 seconds. At 5'06'' a furious third theme on the brass is added to the storm, and the whole outpouring of anguish, hysteria and rage culminates, at 8'19'', in a moment that could be the sound of a heart breaking. The remainder of the movement is a slump from rage into exhaustion in which the third theme is ‘transfigured' (Piers Burton-Page’s word in Radio 3’s CD Review) from trumpeting rage to dully groaning lament. It is as accurate a portrayal of a failing will as I have ever heard. When I brace myself to listen to this music, I hear first England's heart broken, then England’s loss of heart.
The sixth symphony, first performed in 1948, is even more difficult. It begins not with a cry of anguish but an annihilating crash:
Again it has been the first movement that has intrigued me. Just as I have to grit my teeth through the opening of the Fourth, so I struggle to tolerate the first ferociously discordant minute of the Sixth. Again it is a second theme that makes the listener stay: this time a strangely catchy, snappy and jazzy segment with an almost shady quality, which begins at 3'13'' with a snarky jeer immediately irritated at having to repeat itself. The composer was in his mid-seventies when he wrote this music, but this is not the work of a man mellowing into old age; he is raging, not necessarily against the dying of the light, but certainly against something, and in every way he can think of. The unsettling mood prevails; at 4'28'' a third theme appears unobtrusively on the violins, tense and slightly whingey. It is handed over to the brass at 5'33'' and lent a tone that Stephen Johnson, in this edition of Discovering Music (Radio 3) programme, calls sarcastic, I think with good reason; the next phase of the onslaught is a return to the fury of the opening. But then at the seven minute mark something rather extraordinary happens. The mood softens; the same theme reappears in a rich, sunlit major; the listener, lifted out of the yapping and sneering, suddenly hears music as purely beautiful as anything else Vaughan Williams ever wrote. This is the original theme, we feel; surely its previous appearances were only variations. At last the symphony seems to have a footing; at last we are at home; at last there is some beauty to savour, all the way up to 8'26'', when, just when we have settled into the music and it seems about to brighten into brilliance, it is abruptly — cruelly — obliterated by the same bomb-shell that began the movement.
Below you can hear the moment taken in isolation as the incidental music for ITV’s drama A Family at War, and accompanied by an understated but singularly apt sequence of film (The crash is at 1 minute 28 seconds):
This is not easy music. What was Vaughan Williams thinking? Some critics immediately saw visions of nuclear war and apocalyptic man-made wastes. As always, the composer kept his cards close to his chest. 'I suppose it never occurs to these people that a man might just want to write a piece of music,’ he grumbled. But we can hardly be expected to settle for that. This is a symphony of enormous things, and the enormous rage in this movement seems to be inhuman and heartless, in contrast to the fourth symphony’s heartfelt and very human rage.
We are surely meant to think, as Chris Dansey comments below this video, that this is —
A seriously disturbing piece of music, especially when played as it is here (and as VW intended) with no gaps between the movements. Particularly devastating is that awful moment when the lovely folk-like tune that (nearly) ends the first movement is crushed beneath the final chords before all memory of it is utterly smashed under the jackboots of the second movement'.
The significance of this piece is nothing less than the spiritual death of the West. The first movement is a discordant, fearful lamentation of a world where “the center cannot hold”; a brief, nostalgic lyrical remembrance of the old world appears towards the end, but is engulfed […] The second is an obvious musical interpretation of firebombing; the third--the demoralization of the masses; the fourth--a spiritual desert. Total nihilism. This is what you are hearing.'
I think I agree with this verdict until the phrase ‘total nihilism'. If Vaughan Williams had meant total nihilism, he would have presented it without comment. But I think that minute of sunlight in the first movement referred to earlier, that is brought to an end with the crash described by Chris Dansey, has a significant bearing on the whole symphony. Why is there a warm goblet of familiar England in the desolation's frigid midst; why has it already been twisted and mocked so much before it appears properly? Stephen Johnson's verdict on its previous appearances is that they are not simply variations but parodies, and it is this idea that I find interesting. If these are parodies, Vaughan Williams is making fun of his own musical idiom with its Englishness, its melodies and folk-tunes and its well-worn tenderness. This has made me wonder whether Vaughan Williams might have predicted the deliberate trashing of many aspects of England's culture, by her own people, in the 1960s and 1970s. If the fourth symphony might be England's broken heart, the sixth is a depiction, or at least a prediction, of a hardening of heart, which in my view is what led to the 1960s revolution, even if it has not yet led to the complete ‘spiritual death of the West'.
This now sounds very far indeed from my cup of tea. Surely there is now little to distinguish this music from the work of modernist composers? I think there is an essential difference, though: Vaughan Williams’ motives are not gratuitous. He may be depicting unfeeling darkness and evil, but he is not himself unfeeling; his message is as bleak as any modern artist’s, but he does not himself adopt their off-hand, ironic tone. He paints the end of England not as a matter of course but as the catastrophe we know it would be. If, in presenting a parody of his own style, appearing to scoff at the very beauty for which he himself has striven, he makes the decision to place theoriginal after the spoofs, then it is the parody itself, and not the original, that is in inverted commas. He does not mean the parody as a parody; he means it as a demonstration of the ugliness of parody. It is mockery in brackets.
The proof of this is that the original and beautiful theme outlasts the jeers and sniggers, even if it is itself ‘crushed beneath the final chords’. For I think he is still listening to the heart of England even as he drops the discord onto the end of the first movement. Beauty does not survive cataclysm, but at least it outlasts ugliness and parody. Here Vaughan Williams sacrifices one of his greatest tunes in order to paint darkness, but the important thing is that this darkness is seen for what it is. He does not glorify it or merely depict it detachedly: he hammers it out for us to mull over its horror. It is a human depiction of inhumanity. And he wrote this music because he understood England deeply, even England's uglinesses, and he understood England deeply because he loved England deeply, uglinesses and all.
Vaughan Williams wrote his fourth and sixth symphonies in peacetime, but I have said nothing so far about the fifth, which was given its première performance in the middle of the Blitz in London. Surely this would be a similar register of distress and despair at the wanton wreckage all around with no end in sight? But the fifth symphony is not like this. It is a serene pool of comfort. Again Vaughan Williams listens to the heart of England and hears the steady beating below the surface. Where in the fourth he brings out the grief beneath the veneer of peace, and in the sixth the hardened heart behind outward victory, in the fifth he perceives English tradition, character and gentleness intact amid the wreck of war. The whole symphony is bathed in this calmness and sounds all the more achingly beautiful for the tumult that we know surrounds it in space, time and the composer’s own œuvre. My favourite is probably the Romanza, the third movement:
Yes, if we English wish to understand ourselves properly, I think we could do a lot worse than to study this man’s music.
Today is the centenary of the beginning of the battle of the Somme.
May today’s young men especially give thanks for the comfort and plenty they enjoy; may they not squander it or take it for granted; may they, spared being sent ‘over the top…, spend their lives in the service of goodness, justice and peace.
The music is the ‘Shropshire Lad’ rhapsody by George Butterworth (1885–1916), killed at the Somme on the 5th August, 1916.
