Vaughan Williams, Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis

Vaughan Williams studied also at the other royal institution in the 1890s, and after this he learned briefly with Bruch and Ravel. Like Tippett, and somewhat ironically, Vaughan Williams himself was dissatisfied with the English musical scene and sought to forge a language that is independent from continental influences and distinctly English. It was for this reason that he looked into music of his native land – both church and folk music. The 800 folksongs he collected may seem a tiny amount compared to Bartók’s collection of Romanian, Slovak and Hungarian melodies (there are 10,000 of them), but it was nevertheless a very substantial project to undertake. Vaughan Williams also co-edited the English Hymnal (1906) and included in it Tallis’s Phrygian melody When Rising from the Bed of Death – the melody on which this Fantasia is based.

The genre of the fantasia has always been a loosely defined one. For the Baroque composers the term was interchangeable with others such as prelude or even toccata. A fantasia in the 19^th Century usually implies a body of music that has no breaks between its inner sections; an example would be Schumann’s 4^th symphony (also called the symphonic fantasy) where the movements lead on to one another seamlessly.

The different sections of Vaughan Williams’s fantasia (1910, revised 1913 and 1919) serve to present various fantasies on Tallis’s tune, or rather, on the different fragments of Tallis’s tune. These fragments actually appear before the proper statement of the theme, thus giving an impression that both the theme and the fantasies grew out of these unassuming melodic cells. Apart from the melodic material, the sections are also marked by the changes of texture, and by employing a double string orchestra, Vaughan Williams afforded himself a great deal of variety to work with. Examples of these different textures include dialogues between the two orchestras, or between the orchestras and the solo quartet, or even thinning it out to a single solo line.

October 2012