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Vaughan Williams, the Symphony and the Second World War by William Hedley
"All I know is that it is what I wanted to do at the time." RVW on his Fourth Symphony
"...one may hazard that the Fifth Symphony is
Vaughan Williams's greatest work because it is a quest that attains
its goal."
Wilfrid Mellers
"What does this amazing symphony say, mean,
want of us?"
Christopher Palmer on the Sixth Symphony
In trying to appreciate a difficult piece of music
a logical starting point would seem to be what the composer himself
had to say about it. Let's look at two of the greatest figures in twentieth
century English music to see how this might work in practice. Britten
rarely ventured into the written word, either to comment on his own
music or on that of others, still less on other subjects, and he gave
few interviews. When he did commit himself to print he didn't say much.
Tippett, on the other hand, wrote a lot, about philosophy and politics,
as well as his own music and the often complex issues behind it. He
also wrote his own opera libretti. Opinion is sharply divided about
the quality of Tippett's literary skills, but it's safe to say that
many commentators believe he should have stuck to music.
Are we to rely on what composers have to say about
their own works? They frequently seem so concerned with technical matters
that their attempts at explanation result in overloaded phrases full
of specialist language which mean little to the average music lover,
helping hardly at all. In any case, to what extent does music have to
be explained, and is the composer necessarily the best person to do
this?
Reading National Music and other Essays makes
clear that Ralph Vaughan Williams was an accomplished writer. The thoughts
expressed are authoritative, yet they appear in an easily digested form,
avoiding technical language whilst retaining substance. They are exceptionally
readable; he was, as we say nowadays, a good communicator. The one disappointment
is that his own music is only obliquely dealt with. This is a pity,
since we need guidance on much of it.
Of the three symphonies associated with the period
of the Second World War, the violence of the Fourth has been explained
by many as the composer's response to the rising threat of another global
conflict. The Fifth was given its first performance at the height of
the war, yet it is one of the composer's most untroubled works, at least
on the surface, closing in "pure blessedness" (Ottaway, p40).
And then in the Sixth, composed in large part after the war, we find
neither optimism nor hope, but something rather more akin to the mood
of the Fourth, yet different: more complex in its effect and profoundly
enigmatic.
The Fourth Symphony came as a shock to contemporary
audiences, even if they sought to explain it by reference to the times.
Many saw in the serenity of the Fifth an old man's farewell gesture
to the world. The Sixth was the most perplexing of the three, and remains
so for most of us, but if we look to the composer for help we are frustrated.
On the subject of the Sixth Symphony he once said to Roy Douglas "It
never seems to occur to people that a man might just want to write a
piece of music" (Kennedy, 1964, p302).
This was Vaughan Williams' way, but it simply will
not do. We may listen to Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique simply
as a piece of music and gain much pleasure from it, but knowing the
programme behind it helps us gain much more. In any case the programme
forms an integral part of the work and of the composer's intentions.
We may equally appreciate the beauties of Vaughan Williams' Pastoral
Symphony without knowing that it relates to his experiences in the
First World War, but it helps enormously when we do. And Vaughan Williams
did give it a name, after all, even if the name tells only part of the
story and the composer chose not to divulge the rest for many years.
This too was Vaughan Williams' way. None of the three symphonies under
discussion bears a name, and the composer gave few clues as to their
meaning. Indeed, on the Sixth Symphony he wrote "I DO NOT BELIEVE
IN meanings and mottoes'" (Kennedy, 1964, p302). This, along with
his comment to Roy Douglas, would lead us to believe that he wanted
these works to be heard without questioning their meaning, but is this
really the right way, a responsible way of appreciating this music?
In the first part of this paper I want first to provide
an introduction to the three wartime symphonies, Nos. 4, 5 and 6, with
particular attention to No. 5; and second, to try to delve deeper into
the question of what these works mean. I know there will be readers
for whom this search is fruitless because unimportant.
I've recently been able to listen to and compare eighteen
different recorded performances of the Fifth Symphony. The second part
of my paper is a report on that privilege.
PART 1
Which of Vaughan Williams' symphonies more properly
finds its place in an edition of the Journal devoted to the Second World
War? If we look at the dates, the Fourth Symphony was first performed
in April 1935, the Fifth in June 1943 and the Sixth in April 1948. The
Fourth is a work of shocking violence; the Sixth likewise, with an added,
otherworldly, cold deadness about it; and the Fifth, for the most part,
is radiant and serene and filled with the spirit of human goodness and
hope. Yet it's the Fifth which most occupied the composer during the
actual war years.
Vaughan Williams wrote that he began the Fourth in
1931 and completed it in 1934. Although this was undoubtedly a turbulent
period of European history, Kennedy reminds us (p230) that he began
work on it two years before Hitler came to power in Germany, and the
work must have been taking shape in his mind for some time before that.
The general reaction to this tumultuous piece was,
as we know, one of shock. Yet if the public were unprepared for the
apparent change in style this music brought with it, they should not
have been, as signs were present in a number of earlier works, in the
Piano Concerto, for example, in Sancta Civitas and especially,
in Job. But we see that now with the benefit of hindsight, and
in any case, nothing, not even Job, could have prepared the public
for the opening of the Fourth Symphony: full orchestra, fortissimo,
Cs in the bass, the most fundamental of notes, and above them D flats;
in short, a crashing dissonance of a semitone, perhaps the harshest
sound available to a composer. Dissonance in itself usually leads to
consonance: a fourth resolving onto a third brings repose, a seventh
resolving onto an octave, as at the end of the St Matthew Passion
or Sibelius' Seventh Symphony, brings finality. But here the resolution
lasts only an instant until the dissonance take over again. The first
subject group is made up of this and other motifs which share the same,
uncompromising violence and which lead after a mercifully short time
to an equally short full stop. The second subject, on the face of it,
brings complete contrast: a huge, long-limbed, wide-ranging melody played
in octaves by all the strings except the double basses, a huge melody
of extremes, infused with extraordinary expressive and lyric power,
yet whose accompaniment of chords does nothing to establish any notion
of pulse. As it subsides, what little respite it has been able to create
is soon dissipated by the return of the original mood. Its return leads
in turn to the coda. Here the original clash between C in the bass and
D flat above it is presented quite differently: the D flat music is
filled out into chords played pianissimo by muted strings. The D flat
eventually wins, for the moment, and the movement subsides into silence.
The slow movement presents us with no heart-warming
melodies to sing on the way home, only fragments of themes, passed round
from one to another in the orchestra, often over pizzicato bass, seemingly
going not very far. The range of these melodies is restricted, claustrophobic,
yet when, at the end of the movement, the solo flute presents its descending,
closing phrases we realise that this has been our goal all along. I
have found this movement one of the composer's hardest nuts to crack,
so I was interested to read that after the first performance he said
that Boult was the one who had created it: "'he himself had not
known how it should go, but Adrian had." (UVW, p205)
One aspect of this symphony which is often missed is
its humour: the scherzo and trio is a rollicking thing based on rising
fourths. It is linked to the finale by a passage in which the timpani
are put to the same use as did Beethoven in his Fifth Symphony, and
the finale bursts on us in a similar way to the Beethoven work also.
Humour is again present in the first part of this movement, in the oompa
accompaniment for example, but it is humour of a darker kind: there's
not much lightness of touch here. The symphony ends with what the composer
calls an Epilogo fugato, based on a four-note theme which is at once
derived from the opening gesture of the symphony but which is also reminiscent
of the four-note figure so often used by Bach and based on his own name.
The music rises, as Michael Kennedy has memorably put it "to boiling-point"
(p268) before the opening dissonances return, only to be summarily dismissed
with a final chord of open fifths.
No description of this piece can hope to convey the
impression it creates to someone who has never heard it. It is music
which takes you by the throat, its own extraordinary energy drags you
with it. But energy is of little use in music without logic, and its
inner logic is equally irresistible: the return of the opening music
at the end is stunning at every rehearing. No wonder the audience was
in shock that first time.
We have seen that what the public perceived as a change
of style was not so much a change as the logical outcome of many years
of development, the seeds of the Fourth Symphony being present in earlier
works. Contemporary critics seem to have been taken in too: it was,
they said, dissonant yet already old-fashioned in not following the
twelve note technique recently developed by Schoenberg. It was only
later that the association with the rise of fascism, the threat of war,
the idea of the symphony as a reflection of the times, began to be propagated.
Even Boult, writing in the Musical Times in 1958 (Kennedy, p264) thought
that the composer "foresaw the whole thing". But to what extent
is this true?
We know from his exchanges with Holst that for Vaughan
Williams the most important element of a musical work was not meaning
as such, but beauty. He wrote in 1937 to R G Longman (Kennedy, 1964,
p247) as follows: "...Ido think it beautiful'because
we know that beauty can come from unbeautiful things'" "I
wrote it not as a definite picture of anything external ' e.g. the state
of Europe ' but simply because it occurred to me like this'" and
"I don't think that sitting down and thinking about great things
ever produces a great work of art (at least I hope not ' because I never
do so') a thing just comes ' or it doesn't'"
There is an innocence here which is very endearing,
and I'm not in a position to deny the sincerity of Vaughan Williams'
words, nor would I want to. But it isn't enough to explain away the
opening gesture of this symphony by saying only that that was how it
occurred to him. I don't suggest that he read the papers one day and
decided to compose a symphony about the threat of war, realising there
and then that a grinding, semitonal dissonance was the perfect musical
metaphor for it. But neither do I believe in a twentieth-century composer
who simply strings notes together in the pursuit of beauty. I believe
that "the state of Europe" had a profound effect on this composer's
mind and that this, combined with stylistic developments which were
already taking place within him, was why the Fourth Symphony occurred
to him in the form it did.
The question of meaning is not necessarily a great
deal easier to elucidate even when there are words involved. In his
unaccompanied chanson La bataille, composed in 1515 to celebrate
a French military victory, Clément Janequin vividly illustrated
the words with cries and other noises to imitate the different sounds
of battle. In his War Requiem of 1961 Britten's task was to find
music to convey, in Wilfred Owen's words, "the pity of War".
These are both vocal works composed to texts, and in both cases the
meaning of the music and the meaning of the text are identical. What
Janequin had to express was relatively simple, because the words are
simple. Britten's subject, if not more complex, is more subtle, but
accessible all the same, if only because the texts, those of Owen at
least, are unequivocal in their message. But I think the meaning, or
message, of Sancta Civitas is less clear. The text is certainly
less direct, with many conflicting clues as to what it actually means,
and the music seems stretched almost to bursting point trying to express
ideas which are half-hidden and which perhaps cannot be expressed in
words in any case. Did this music, too, simply occur to him like this?
Let us consider a work without text, from 1938, and
therefore roughly contemporaneous with the Fifth Symphony, the Concerto
for Double String Orchestra, Piano and Timpani by Bohuslav Martinu.
As the threat to peace intensified, and in particular the threat to
the composer's Czech homeland from which he was exiled, he was moved
to compose a work of high tragedy. I don't think it fanciful to hear
in this music fear, apprehension, despair and resignation. In this purely
orchestral work the composer has been able to express universal ideas
in a less exact, but no less intense way, than words would have made
possible.
It's a masterpiece, but I don't suppose its origins
are to be found in a decision on the composer's part to write a piece
about the imminent destruction of his homeland. But I do believe that
it reflects the state of his mind and his preoccupations at the time
he was composing it. Indeed, I don't see how this can be otherwise.
I believe that a creative artist is bound to be affected by events around
him. Vaughan Williams, with his profound concern for humanity, will
have been affected by the gathering storm, and even if he resisted "sitting
down and thinking about great things", the state of his mind, affected
by the state of Europe, is, I believe, the key to the meaning of the
extraordinary series of musical gestures which make up the Fourth Symphony.
The Sixth Symphony, like the Fourth, opens with a dramatic
gesture played by the full orchestra, but we don't really know at first
hearing what the nature of this gesture is. It opens with three notes
rising in a fragment of a scale. How do they affect us? Do we find them
uplifting? In fact, we don't have time to find anything, because straight
away another music brushes them aside: busy, rushing semiquavers, displaced
accents. From time to time the original gesture returns, but never for
very long and never to any lasting effect. There isn't much to latch
onto in the way of melody. The cellos have a go but it soon peters out.
Then, at Figure 8, there is a more lyrical subject, but one which, in
spite of its longer note values, stubbornly refuses to turn into a real
tune, and which, in addition, returns obsessively and repeatedly to
the same note, B. Soon the scurrying, unquiet music returns, the displaced
accents again preventing the music settling to anything. The second
subject returns on the brass, but the accompaniment undermines any lyrical
quality it may have. Once again the fast music has the upper hand, and
then, a remarkable moment, out of nowhere: the harp strums a couple
of E major chords as accompaniment, at last, to the second subject properly
allowed to flower into a long-breathed, even singable melody. It rises
now, seemingly about to take wing, though the obsessive repeated return
to the tonic, now an E, doesn't help much. Again it tries and seems
almost to be succeeding when the unquiet music returns, and in the space
of no more than three bars all that this melody has been aspiring to,
all that it hoped to achieve (if we may so express it) is brutally destroyed,
the movement ending with a return of the opening gesture, now seen for
what it really is, disillusion, disappointment, destruction, passing
through a harsh cadence to end on fortissimo unison Es, like a blow.
By this point we have had our moment of hope, and there
won't be any more. The second movement begins without a break. A three-note
rhythmic motif dominates this movement and will not let go. A central
section offers some respite, but so cold and inhuman, so totally lacking
in hope or warmth is it that we are almost glad when the three-note
motif returns.
The scherzo is extraordinary: rapid counterpoint, opaque;
a constant cacophony removing all will, all ability to reason or reflection.
The sheer number of notes is awe-inspiring. A saxophone interrupts its
progress at one point to deliver a sort of perverted night-club solo,
but otherwise it is page after page of quavers and semiquavers, constantly
on the go, yet going nowhere; verbose, garrulous, but saying nothing.
It just runs out of steam in the end, and so begins
the slow finale. Here we encounter an almost empty soundscape, wandering
melodic lines which again lead nowhere, often one or two voices in counterpoint,
pointless, lacking in direction, lacking in melody, and all that in
a constant pianissimo senza crescendo. It's a little like Neptune
in The Planets, but in Holst's case there seems little doubt
that humans are gazing at the distant planet. Here, human beings, human
feelings, are absent, and when, at the close, two chords swing one to
the other they could so easily continue to swing for a few hours (or
an age or two) more. It would make little difference.
If Vaughan Williams had announced that this movement
was meant to represent in music the aftermath of atomic warfare he would
have been hailed as a genius who had succeeded one hundred per cent
in his aim. But he didn't say that: in fact, he said nothing like it,
gave no clue as to what, if anything, this most enigmatic of his works
was meant to express. As we have seen, he claimed that the whole idea
that his music meant anything was disagreeable to him, but once again
we must see this as inadequate.
Take, for example, the third movement. It never stops
talking, yet it says nothing: newspeak, doublespeak, nonespeak. Like
a politician replying to a question, this music contrives at once to
give the impression that the material of which it is made is being dealt
with, engaged, whereas what is actually happening is that the material
is being subjected to some kind of treatment, but one which leaves it
essentially unchanged and the questioner so weary that the matter is
no longer pursued.
Would we have heard the sea in Debussy's La Mer
had he called the work simply Three Symphonic Sketches? I don't
really think so, but neither do I think, in that particular case, that
it would matter much. So does it matter that we don't know what, if
anything, was in Vaughan Williams' mind as he composed the finale of
his Sixth Symphony? Perhaps he feared that if this silent, unpeopled
landscape were explained the essentially enigmatic nature of the music
would be lost and a large part of its effect with it. I would tend to
agree. But that does not necessarily mean that the music does not mean
or represent anything.
Searching for meaning in the three symphonies which
span the Second World War, we may finally argue that the Fourth Symphony
expresses the concerns felt by the composer, and those felt by any thinking
person, at the increasing tension in the political situation in Europe
from the early part of the 1930s onwards. And given the nature of the
conflict, its close over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, universal hope turned
to disquiet, the Cold War; given these things, the atmosphere of the
Sixth Symphony should not surprise us either.
Nothing new there, then. And if we are to accept the
composer's insistence that these were just pieces of music, perhaps
allowing for my view that the state of his mind at this time, influenced
as it must have been by the state of world events, was at the origin
of the particular nature of these works, what are we to make of the
Fifth Symphony, almost entirely composed during the war years, and first
performed in 1943?
We know that the reaction of many was relief that the
composer had apparently reverted to his original style. He seemed to
be showing how things could be once, as Boult put it, "this madness"
was over (UVW p254). And then there was the feeling that the seventy-one
year-old composer had written his swan-song, that the symphony as a
whole and its radiant close in particular amounted to a particularly
eloquent valedictory gesture. How wrong they were!
The symphony opens quietly with low Cs and horn calls
which do nothing to establish a sense of stability. Yet it is not a
violent instability like opening of the Fourth, more a kind of stable
instability, as the dissonance thus formed does not strive to resolve
onto something else: we are happy to go along with it. In this I completely
agree with Hugh Ottaway that this chord is emphatically not a dominant
seventh in G major. I have always heard this movement to be more in
D than anything else, and the composer's reported uncertainty between
G and D mystifies me. The music is modal in character, yet the tonal
centre is either D with a flattened seventh or sometimes C with a raised
fourth, both representing the kind of modal writing found throughout
Vaughan Williams' music. The violins play a fragment of a tune, then
the same slightly extended and which is used at moments of transition,
sometimes crucially, throughout the work. There then follows a longer
melody played by the violins in octaves, a harmonised reprise of the
opening melodic fragment then a return to the longer melody, fleshed
out and with canons, again played by the violins. When played at the
marked dynamics under a conductor with great control this passage communicates
enormous serenity. Frequently, however, conductors take this passage
louder than the composer's intentions, which introduces a yearning quality
into the music which is certainly very affecting, but is it what the
composer wanted?
The whole of this passage is underscored by the note
C either held in the bass or continually recurring there, maintaining
a gentle tonal ambiguity irrespective of the keys through which pass
the upper voices. This instability remains until the magical moment
when, at another statement of the opening fragment, the mists clear
as the music modulates to a straightforward E major, the same key, incidentally,
to which Vaughan Williams was to turn some years later for a related
reason for the big first movement melody of his Sixth Symphony.
This E major melody is also of crucial importance.
As Kennedy points out (p281), with minor changes of rhythm and the suppression
of a single passing note the first eleven notes of this passage are
identical in melodic contour to the "Alleluia" in Vaughan
Williams' hymn tune Sine Nomine, "For all the saints who
from their labours rest". The music rises to a climax and then
subsides onto unison Es. At this point the music takes on a more rapid
feel: the strings play a long series of quavers as accompaniment to
a falling two-note phrase in the woodwind. This is later extended to
three notes and then to a melodic phrase, also falling, which is reminiscent
of the opening of the movement. The tension increases as the string
quavers turn to semiquavers and the music again rises to a climax before
slowing and subsiding to the return of the opening music, complete with
pianissimo horn calls. The first phrase of the modal melody is repeated
several times as a way of increasing tension until the second subject
returns, now in B flat major and marked to be played "Tutta forza"
and which leads to the real climax of the movement, marked by descending
scale passages repeated in sequence. The coda is distant and mysterious,
based on the horn calls, the first phrase of the modal theme and its
development, first heard in the allegro section but now much slower.
The music dies away to nothing, or rather to two held notes, a D in
the violas, ostensibly the keynote of the movement and of the symphony,
but with the omnipresent, destabilising C in the cellos too.
The Scherzo is in rapid three time, but the rhythm
only settles down at the seventh bar, and this uncertainty contributes
to the feeling that the movement begins in the same world as the previous
one had ended. The music is made up of many short themes and fragments
of themes, some muted and ethereal, others, later in the movement, more
robust. A frequent presence is a scurrying accompaniment of quavers
played by the strings and requiring considerable virtuosity. An important,
short, slower melodic phrase first introduced by the horns is repeated
many times, harmonised in the trombones and the higher winds. After
a while the metre changes to two in a bar and the character of the music
becomes much more assertive and even spiteful. But within a very short
time this is being undermined, subtly at first, by a syncopated figure
in the strings which eventually becomes transformed into a yearning
cantabile passage in longer notes which Wilfred Mellers has called "a
song of infinite longing" (p263). The opening music returns and
the movement, still rapid, subsides nonetheless into silence.
Out of this silence grow the six, sublime chords which
begin the slow movement, and over a repeat of five of them a solo cor
anglais sings a sad little tune in the key of C whose fourth degree
is sometimes sharpened, sometimes not, modal colours once again. There
then follows the first of three passages of polyphony, first on the
strings alone, whose diatonic harmony is pure Vaughan Williams. Rising
and falling chords, organum-like, accompany woodwind arabesques, before
the polyphonic passage returns, more richly orchestrated now and rising
to an Alleluia at its climax. The organum returns, the woodwinds too,
extended this time, and the music dances, briefly, for four bars (at
Figure 5) where the organum appears at double speed. The music becomes
more agitated, but calm is restored for a moment by the solo horn who
borrows the cor anglais' original melody. The agitated music returns,
however, leading to alarums which are positively heraldic in splendour
and menace. But the calm polyphony once more returns, this time rising
to a passionate Alleluia climax which creates the atmosphere in which
the movement will close. Two short violin solos, further, hushed Alleluias
' which Whittall calls "dangerously saccharine" (Frogley p207)
' and the music sinks into A major silence.
A major is the dominant of D major, and at last the
finale opens unequivocally in this key. It is also the first time a
movement has begun in a totally different mood from the end of the previous
one. It is a passacaglia, a series of variations on a repeated theme,
usually first heard in the bass. And so it is here, except that the
passacaglia is not very strict and the theme is no more important than
a counter-melody presented in the seventh bar by the first violins and
flutes. This music is full of smiles and the sort of goodwill to be
found in Haydn as well as in Vaughan Williams. It's very moving, too:
the Alleluia which has preoccupied the composer in the previous movement
is back here as soon as the fourteenth bar.
The smiles turn to something like laughter ' this music
really is very jolly ' before the metre changes to one in a bar festivities
based on the counter melody. Twice more the same series of events takes
place until held chords, trumpets and horns first, then trombones, herald
a change in things. What happens next is a long, carefully worked-out
passage to prepare us for the end of the symphony. The upper instruments
develop the counter melody, the bass instruments the theme ' their roles
are thus reversed ' with much rhythmic development, counterpoint and
rising tension. When the high point has clearly been reached a fragment
of the passacaglia theme is repeated several times to present the return,
fortissimo, of the horn calls from the very opening of the symphony.
As the tension calms after this moment of high drama the short melodic
fragment with which the symphony also began is used for the last time
to usher in the epilogue. This is music of quite extraordinary calm.
In searching to describe it we might use words like tranquillity and
benediction. From the beginning of the epilogue to the end of the work
there is not a single accidental, which explains some things, but not
the remarkable spirit the composer creates here. Based on the counter-melody
and its Alleluia it gradually moves out in two directions, the basses
finding their way eventually to the certainty of the lowest D, the upper
strings climbing ever higher, overlapping each other in their successful
search for a stratospheric A. Young players who resent having to practise
their scales might pause and wonder at the last thing the first clarinet
is given to play. It's nothing more than a rising, two-octave scale
of D major, supported by the second clarinet in the first octave, but
how the player must look forward to that rising scale, a metaphor, like
the strings' music, a great church spire reaching towards heaven.
So simple seems the overall message of the Fifth Symphony
that to ask questions as to its meaning seems impertinent. Yet we must
not forget that this most radiant music first appeared at the height
of the war. The composer used a fair bit of existing music for his symphony,
drawing on several different sources. Most notable amongst them was
his as yet unfinished opera based on Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress.
Why he drew so extensively on this music is unclear. It may simply be
that he didn't want such valuable material to remain locked in a project
which he feared may never be completed. The music is often used quite
differently in the symphony from in the opera, and any interpretation
we might try to put on the symphony with relation to the opera should
certainly be treated with caution. In any case, the links between the
two represent a whole area of study and are beyond the scope of this
paper. Let us just note two things. Firstly, the composer said that
only in the slow movement was there any dramatic connection between
the two works, and it was on the manuscript of the slow movement that
he had inscribed "Upon this place stood a cross, and a little below
a sepulchre. Then he said: "He hath given me rest by his sorrow,
and life by his death."" Secondly, Bunyan's work, in essentially
simple language, tells of a soul who sets out on a quest and, meeting
numerous allegorical characters on the way, eventually achieves his
goal. The Fifth Symphony may also be viewed in these terms.
In a fascinating paper in the RVW Society Journal (No.
17) Arnold Whittall challenged a number of assumptions about the work,
and in particular the meaning ' how else can one express the matter?
' of the epilogue. He quite rightly says that the optimism and triumph
of the finale is compromised by the thunderous return of the music from
the symphony' opening horn calls. This "crisis", as he puts
it, "adds up to the fact that the ending could go either way."
Vaughan Williams was later to do something similar at the end of the
first movement of the Sixth Symphony as already cited, but in the other
direction. The music there seems to be verging on optimism, albeit unrealistic,
to be striving for something positive and hopeful to latch onto, when
the door is slammed in its face, as it were, leaving only disillusion
and despair.
Whittall writes "...I find the closing stages
of the Fifth's first movement to be the most bleak and disturbing music
the composer ever wrote." We've seen that this coda is made up
of a single, slower restatement of a tune first heard in the development
section, plus the opening horn calls and lower string held notes. It
would seem that if we find the coda "bleak and disturbing"
we should perhaps find the opening of the symphony likewise, since it
made up of essentially the same music. It's true, however, that the
composer adds, in the coda, a single note, F, which changes everything.
The music now hovers between the sort of ambiguous D tonal centre first
heard at the outset, and the note F played in unison by the oboe and
cor anglais, a particularly strange, hollow sound. Whether this adds
up to "the most bleak and disturbing" music seems to depend
on the how the conductor reads it. Most conductors find mystery here,
though some encourage their players to a warmer tone and miss it completely.
Its true, now, that if the conductor does not find this bleakness by
soliciting a colder, emptier sound, I feel short-changed, as if an element
of the symphony is missing, but whether it is present in the notes,
whether it is right, is another matter. What I think essential is that
the Scherzo should begin in the same world as the first movement ends.
Whittall supports his argument for a new reading of
the epilogue by saying that the fact that the music allows for different
interpretations is part of its stature. This seems to me a strange way
of looking at the problem. A response I wrote to Whittall's article
was published in the following issue of the Journal (No. 18). As I wrote
there, "I find [the closing pages] amongst the most unequivocal
in all music, as straightforward in their own way as the closing pages
of Beethoven's Fifth." Are we to argue that the closing pages of
Beethoven's Fifth can "go either way" (Whittall) and that
that is a mark of the music's stature. Or is that stature being called
into question by those who argue that the end of Beethoven's Fifth is
simply an expression of triumph with no ambiguity of any kind?
What are the feelings that the closing pages of Vaughan
Williams' Fifth provoke? Well, for this listener, relatively simple
things: profound calm; contentment; peace of mind; optimism in spite
of the past. I believe the public reacted in this sort of way after
the first performance which took place, let's not forget, in the midst
of war. No wonder, given the nature of the music, they saw it as a message
of how things might be "once this madness is over".
A few general points now. This is a complex score,
though less so than many. The composer gives relatively little guidance
to his interpreters as to how it should go. Compared to an Elgar symphony,
for example, or even others by the same composer, there is very little
in the way of expression marks. Whole passages go by where the initial
mezzo forte marking is modified by not so much as a "hairpin"
crescendo.
As for the speed of the music, though meticulous, the
indications are also sparing. The Preludio ' each movement is given
a title in Italian ' is marked Moderato, crotchet = 80, with the central
Allegro at minim = 75. No accelerando is marked in this passage, though
almost all conductors make one. Most are likewise well below the marked
tempo at the beginning of the movement. Rather more of them do as the
composer asks in the Scherzo, originally marked Presto, dotted minim
= 120, with the word misterioso added later, presumably part of the
minor revisions of 1951 (Kennedy/Eulenberg), but they are hard put to
avoid it becoming uncomfortably breathless. Not a single conductor on
the list below launches the Romanza at the marked Lento, crotchet =
66, and many are close to half that speed. At each of the three appearances
of the main theme the composer asks that the music should move on a
little. A number of other tempo changes are indicated for the more agitated
passages, but the indications in the score require the tempo of the
main material to remain constant. The Passacaglia begins Moderato, crotchet
= 120. Once again, rare is the recorded performance which begins at
this speed, though several are not far short. Later indications suggest
that the composer views this as definitely three in a bar, but at this
tempo the music easily becomes more like one in a bar, and benefits
accordingly in my view. It is clear, and bearing in mind that metronome
marks are usually given for guidance only, that Vaughan Williams wanted
his Fifth to be played faster than conductors want to play it. Even
the recordings at which he was or may have been present are slower than
his markings, yet he left them in place. He clearly wished that the
music should keep moving, and even if conductors today find his marked
tempi uncongenial, they should certainly wonder why they are so rapid,
and adapt their interpretation accordingly. In listening to these performances
I have come to the conclusion that the most successful are those which
seek a simplicity of utterance, which avoid bombast, inflation, exaggeration;
where the expression is kept within bounds, and crucially, where things
happen ' crescendos, decrescendos, accelerandos ' at exactly the moment
the composer marks them in the score. The more sparing the indications
the more important it is to respect those which are there, and this
applies also to questions of tempo.
A passage of particular interest in this respect is
the one in the first movement which is marked "tutta forza"
and leads some bars later to the movement's climax. Only the timpani
are silent at this point, and a composer's marking of "tutta forza"
speaks for itself. There is no indication that the music is to slow
down, however; indeed, a crotchet = crotchet marking might be taken
to indicate the opposite, though this is probably part of a different,
though related, technical matter. Yet almost every conductor holds back,
sometimes very much, occasionally to almost grotesque effect, and frequently
to take up the original tempo four bars later. I would love to hear
this passage as the composer seems to have wanted, and the following
bars to move on impulsively to the climax of the movement, avoiding
even very much in the way of ritenuto at the end of the passage. This
is how I would do it if I were invited to conduct this symphony ' concert
promoters and record producers please note. Boult, in his second recording,
comes nearest to the spirit of what I mean, and Menuhin too, at first,
though he pulls back the tempo enormously into the coda.
The orchestra required is relatively modest: two flutes,
one doubling piccolo, oboe and cor anglais, two clarinets, two bassoons,
two horns, two trumpets, two trombones and bass trombone, timpani and
strings. The basic sound is of the mass of strings, often, as in the
first movement, doubled in the higher octaves by the flutes. Most of
the really important material is heard first on the strings, and of
course their radiance totally dominates the close of the work. The presence
of the cor anglais gives a particular colour to the wind choir. The
orchestral writing in the first movement Allegro owes something to Sibelius,
to whom the symphony was dedicated, though the passage can sound equally
like Tchaikovsky in some performances. Some of the trickier customers
our Pilgrim meets on his journey can perhaps be heard in the Scherzo,
where the orchestration in the spikier, staccato passages, is rather
hard and biting. In the Romanza, the parallel, organum-like, dark chords
heard in the lower wind and strings reflect perhaps the sepulchre in
the deleted Bunyan superscription. And then a curiosity. At the high
point of this movement the timpani are added to the texture to underline
the drama. It would appear that in the mid-1980s it was discovered that
an error had crept into the score, and that these few timpani notes
should be played one bar sooner than marked. There is no doubt that
this amendment makes musical sense, especially from the harmonic point
of view, and all the conductors on record from Vernon Handley onwards
have been convinced by the argument. Yet the first two recordings were
made during the composer's lifetime, he was probably present at the
first Boult recording, and he conducted the work several times himself.
Is it really possible that he never noticed this error? And if he did,
why has it taken so long to come to light? I'd be grateful to any reader
with anything to contribute on this curious story.
I'd like to end my discussion of this wonderful piece
by dealing for a moment with the question of the Alleluias. We have
seen that the second subject of the Preludio is an almost note for note
transcription of the Alleluia of Sine Nomine. The symphony ends,
indeed its final cadence is composed of, similar references. But it's
a different Alleluia that I hear more, both here and elsewhere in the
composer's output. The hymn tune Easter Alleluya (Lasst uns erfreuen)
from the Cölner Gesangbuch of 1623 and sung to several hymns, "All
creatures of our God and King", for example, was included in the
1931 edition of Songs of Praise as number 157. Vaughan Williams
characteristically brushed aside suggestions that he had quoted this
tune, but I find the argument for it very persuasive. We should also
bear in mind that it was used by Holst in 1920 as the basis of his setting
of Psalm 148. The Alleluias are simple downward scales first from tonic
to dominant, then from subdominant to tonic, which corresponds exactly
with Vaughan Williams use of the Alleluia motif in the Fifth Symphony
but also in Flos Campi, as well as the most touching use made
of it in Hugh the Drover (Kennedy, 1964, p.183).
This paper first appeared in the Journal of the Ralph
Vaughan Williams Society.
SOURCES
Achenbach, Andrew, 2000, Vaughan Williams's Fifth,
The Gramophone, June 2000
Barber, Robin, 1998, Record Review, RVW Society
Journal, No. 13
Frogley, Alan (ed.), 1996, Vaughan Williams Studies,
Cambridge
Hedley, William, 2000, On Reading Arnold Whittall's
Article on the Fifth Symphony, RVW Society Journal, No. 18
Kennedy, Michael, 1964, The Works of Ralph Vaughan
Williams, Clarendon, 1992
Kennedy, Michael, 1982, Ralph Vaughan Williams:
Symphony in D major, (preface to Eulenberg miniature score), Eulenberg.
Whittall, Arnold, 2000, The Fifth Symphony, a study
of genesis and genre, RVW Society Journal, No. 17
Mellers, Wilfrid, 1989, Vaughan Williams and the
Vision of Albion, Albion, 1997
Ottaway, Hugh, 1972, Vaughan Williams Symphonies,
BBC
Vaughan Williams, Ralph, 1934, National Music and
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