Sixty years since Vaughan Williams’ death

'Sigh no more ladies, sigh no more’: Vaughan Williams’ setting of lines from Shakespeare’s ‘Much Ado About Nothing’.

Today, 26th August, is the sixtieth anniversary of the death of Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958).  Was he England’s greatest composer?  The question will not be easily settled, and maybe half the fun is never quite to do so.  If, as is not an uncommon view, he vies with Edward Elgar and Benjamin Britten for the title, then he has plenty of competition.  All I know is this: if Britten or even Elgar are to compete with Vaughan Williams, then they too in due course will have to come to draw me, again and again, yet in a different way every time, into an enlightening, melodic and unfailingly distinctive musical world.  For now Vaughan Williams, both the composer and the man, is in first place in my book.

His was a life that in many ways took place in reverse.  His emergence as a composer came relatively late — he did not complete his first symphony until the age of thirty-five — but once he had done so, his output was constant and unwaning; indeed, his music seemed to intensify as he aged.  Those who perceived in his fifth symphony — premièred in 1942, his seventieth year — a mellowing in age, or even a valedictory overtone, would hardly have suspected that this was actually the half-way mark.  All through his last decade he seemed unstoppable — in the 1950s alone he added the final three to his total of nine symphonies, brought to fruition his opera The Pilgrim’s Progress, completed concertos for harmonica and tuba, and wrote music for Queen Elizabeth’s Coronation, all the while continuing to conduct and attend concerts and musical events.  And it was not only musically that he thrived in the autumn of his life: after the death in 1951 of his wife Adeline, whom for decades he had had to watch gradually succumbing to arthritis, he was rejuvenated by a second marriage to Ursula Wood, a poet and playwright (and muse, whose poetry he set to music).  So, although he lived to eighty-five, he seems almost to have been cut off in his prime.

Music for the film 49th Parallel.

I admire Vaughan Williams in the first place for the most straightforward reason: because the sound of so much of his music appeals to me so directly.  He wove together countless melodies, harmonies, textures and cadences in the service of beauty for its own sake.  This beauty often seems so self-evident to me that I would struggle to explain it to someone who does not hear it.  Yet that first beauty, having drawn me in, makes me all the more willing to listen again, more carefully, for details I have missed, or indeed to brave the composer’s more complex or less accessible works.  In that way he has taught me a great deal about the more intellectual side of ‘serious music’: its forms, its structures, and the depth of expression which these make possible.  Thus I have been influenced on one hand by the English Folk-song Suite, which I have loved since I was small, and on the other by the Fourth and Sixth Symphonies, which I have discovered in my twenties: they are the first pieces of music with which I can sympathise without exactly liking.  (Famously, Vaughan Williams himself even said of the fourth symphony that he did not know whether he liked it, but that it was what he meant; I likewise am not sure if I like it, but can see what he means).  Yet in all his works the same personality is discernible in his music, the personality of a companion and a teacher who never forgets the presence of the listener.

The third movement (Scherzo) of the London Symphony, played by the Spanish Radio and Television Orchestra and conducted by Carlos Kalmar.

This equal proficiency in both simplicity and complexity is one sign of another remarkable aspect of Vaughan Williams: his sheer versatility, or his ‘tremendous range’, as Vernon Handley put it.  He wrote music of such different flavours, for so many purposes, and all of it with such convincing results, that it is sometimes hard to believe that a single composer wrote them all.  Is one man really responsible for the tranquil Greensleeves Fantasia and the enthralling anguish of the fourth symphony?  Did the diabolical chortling of Satan’s Dance of Triumph (from Job) come from the same pen as that tiny jewel of an anthem, O Taste and See?  He went off in all sorts of musical directions, but always came back to his own distinctive drawing-board: his work always bears, somewhere or other, the signs and hall-mark of this one personality.  There is Vaughan Williams the collector of folk songs, Vaughan Williams the composer of film scores, Vaughan Williams the compiler of the English Hymnal; his music might be sacred or secular, it might last four minutes or four movements, it might require massed choirs with orchestra underlain by organ, or it might be content with solo violin and piano.  For his harmonies he drew on Tudor polyphony and thirties dance-band music; he experimented with sonority, calling for a wind machine in his Seventh Symphony, a flügelhorn in his Ninth and ‘all the ’phones and ’spiels known to the composer’ in the Eighth.  And then there are the moods that pass over his music, as many and as various as the English weather’s.  It can be serene; it can be furious; it can be reserved; it can be exuberant; it might proliferate with detail or hang quite austerely in the air.  One of the best ways of hearing many of these moods is in that eighth symphony — even in its first movement alone, which is constructed entirely around the very first four notes played:

Another characteristic of his music is — I can think of no subtler word — its manliness.  So much of it seems to express some aspect of, and be so evidently the work of, the heart and spirit of a man, without ever doing so crudely or overbearingly.  In other words, there is somehow a particularly masculine warmth, an outward robustness, a heartiness, a full-bloodedness about it all.  That is not to suggest that his music was not meant for everyone, nor to assume that it was a conscious ambition, but I think it is definitely possible to hear in his work a deep understanding of the vigour, the spirituality, the moods, the quickness, the temper, the restlessness, the passions, and the solitary questing of manhood.

Setting of the Te Deum for the enthronement of Cosmo Gordon Lang as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1928

Then there is his Englishness, the quality of his music which is most often pointed out Vaughan Williams is credited with reviving and developing a particularly English style of music, in contrast with the German idiom that had prevailed before.  Where even Elgar owed a great deal to the tradition of Brahms and Mendelssohn and Beethoven, Vaughan Williams drew instead mainly from the well of Tudor music and traditional English folk-song.  He did not do this in a shallow or jealous sense, but in a search for authenticity, and in a spirit of revival and celebration of the particular, and it worked, for his music sounds like home.  Hear how well his sound-world goes with Shakespeare, or with Chesterton; see how his hymns have passed straight into the canon.  And I think, too, that he sensed the threats to Englishness that were to become concrete — in some cases literally — more or less immediately after his death.  Surely the bleakness all around us, the sullen ugliness of the dual carriageway, and the fast-food outlet, and the retail park — the sheer spiritual exhaustion of modern Britain, sated with banality to the point of grief — is prefigured in much of his music.  Hear, for instance, the desolate passages that close the first movement of the Ninth Symphony:

Against all this, though, Vaughan Williams always opposed the human spirit, in which he found much hope, or at least much worth defending.  One way in which this is made manifest is his treatment of folk-culture and his reverence for traditional folk-songs  There is much to be said for founding ‘high art’ on traditional, unaffected idioms: embellishing and transfiguring familiar, time-worn songs keeps high culture rooted in earth, while elevating and enriching the popular culture.  And even as Vaughan Williams broke new ground with his symphonies and cantatas, Vaughan Williams was content, I think, to be a servant of his age.  His heavy involvement in the local Leith Hill Musical Festival, and his prolific output of hymns and film-scores and ‘practical music’ (notably the Concerto Grosso for musicians of varying accomplishment, or the Household Music written in wartime for whatever instruments were to hand) suggest a profoundly public-spirited man, unashamed of belonging to a particular time and place, and placing his talents at its service.

From all these thoughts I draw the conclusion that, among English and British composers at least, Vaughan Williams is peerless.  Other composers may have shared many of the qualities I have described, but only in Vaughan Williams were they all united.  Sixty years after his death his music seems hardly aged, and is still working its magic on lovers of beauty in new generations.  May it lighten lives for centuries to come.

Ballad from the Suite for Viola and Orchestra