Vaughan Williams

Vaughan Williams: music to heal the soul of a nation

POSTED NOVEMBER 2, 2021

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) was one of the most important composers of the twentieth century and remains one 0f the most popular composers today.  His works include operas, ballets, chamber music, secular and religious vocal pieces and orchestral compositions including nine symphonies, written over sixty years. Strongly influenced by Tudor music and English folk-song, his output marked a decisive break in British music from its German-dominated style of the 19th century.  

Born to a well-to-do family with strong moral and progressive social views, he never took his privileged background* for granted and worked all his life for democratic and egalitarian ideals. He viewed music as being part of everyone’s everyday life, rather than being reserved for an elite.  In keeping with his beliefs, Vaughan Williams refused a knighthood at least once, and declined the post of Master of the King's Music after Elgar's death.  The one state honor he did accept was the Order of Merit, which confers no title.

His most renowned work is his pastoral romance for solo violin and orchestra, The Lark Ascending.  This year, it was voted the greatest piece of music in Classic FM’s Hall of Fame, the world’s biggest poll of classical music tastes, for an unprecedented eleventh time.  Vaughan Williams began the composition shortly before World War I but the work was not premiered until 1921.  Its idyllic, untroubled pastoral quality, melodious violin solo, and traces of a rustic style captured the heart of the British nation after the horrors of World War I, which had killed more than 800,000 of his countrymen.   Continuing to resonate to this day as a glimpse of pre-World War I Britain, its popularity proves Williams' famous statement: “The art of music above all arts is the expression of the soul of the nation."

But you don't have to be British or to have endured conflict and war to love this transcendently beautiful and peaceful piece of music, which is based on a poem by George Meredith. This performance below is by Nicola Benedetti with the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Andrew Litton. 

The first Vaughan Williams work I heard was one of his fantasias, an unfamiliar term that I had not associated with classical music.  The fantasia has deep roots in English music, going back to the 16th century.  Also called a fantasy or fancy, it conforms to no strict form and developed from Renaissance improvisation.  Sixteenth-century lute players were the first to use ‘fantasia’ widely, indicating pieces of varying length which, rather than being transcriptions of songs, were conceived specially for the instrument. These were both ‘fantasies’ in the modern sense (improvisatory in character rather than following set forms) and ‘fantastic’ in the word’s older meaning (full of extravagant display). As the status of purely instrumental music rose in the Baroque era, and musical structures began to define themselves (dance suite, fugue, passacaglia, etc.), the fantasia retained its importance as a kind of imaginative counterbalance.

Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis is a one-movement work for string orchestra by Ralph Vaughan Williams. The theme is by the 16th-century English composer Thomas Tallis, one of the most influential composers of the Tudor era**.  Like several other of Vaughan Williams's works, it draws on the music of the English Renaissance.  For Vaughan Williams, Tudor music went "straight to the fountainhead for its inspiration, . . . inheriting its energy and vitality from the unwritten and unrecorded art of the countryside".   The vast resources of the English folk tradition were maintained as an unofficial oral tradition among the nation's countryfolk.  

A reviewer at the premiere observed, "The melody is modal and antique in flavour, while the harmonies are as exotic as those of Debussy … The work marks out the composer as one who has got quite out of the ruts of the commonplace."

Recording the Tallis Fantasia in the time of Covid, the socially distanced London Philharmonia Orchestra captures the essence of this beautiful, sometimes austere, and ultimately hopeful composition [link below].

Vaughan Williams composed nine symphonies in a wide variety of temperaments, and you can find no greater contrast than that between his Symphonies No.4 and No. 5.   

Written between 1931 and 1934, no work by Ralph Vaughan Williams has caused more of a stir or given rise to greater speculation than his ferocious Symphony No. 4 in F minor.  Some commentators opined that the symphony’s uncompromising violence, toughness of expression and level of dissonance - its whole abrasive demeanor -  represented a warning against the rising tide of fascism.  One colleague claimed that Vaughan Williams ‘foresaw the whole thing [i.e. war] and surely there is no more magnificent gesture of disgust in all music than the final open fifth when the composer seems to rid himself of the whole hideous idea." (You can find a Proms performance of Symphony No. 4 here.)

By the time he finished Symphony No. 5, World War II was raging and the United Kingdom had been subjected to the German Blitzkrieg. Over a period of nine months, the Blitz air raids, which focused on major cities and industrial centers, had killed over 43,500 civilians.  As he did with The Lark Ascending after the First World War, Vaughan Williams turned to a calming pastoral theme to help heal the soul of his nation.  The world is at war, yet the tone of the Fifth Symphony is mostly gentle, melodic and uplifting.  Completed in 1943, the music moves into an alternate world of radiant light, quiet serenity, and sublime mystery.  Classical music scholar Michael Kennedy described No. 5 as "the symphony of the Celestial City."  

Below left is the performance of Symphony No. 5 by the Chicago Symphony conducted by Leonard Slatkin.