ARTS
Vaughan Williams as symphonist
Anthony Burgess
Vaughan Williams Symphonies (RCA GL 43576-83)
T t is no disgrace for a nation not to have 'produced symphonies. The symphony, since the Teutons have excelled in it, may be considered a proper outlet for the Teuton imagination: the Latins have gone a dif- ferent way. The British, encouraged by the House of Hanover, felt themselves to be Teutons at the time of our musical renascence, and it became a duty for a British composer to produce not merely one symphony but a whole group of them. The single symphony of Cesar Franck is a kind of excusable deviation from the Gallic norm, but Elgar had to produce three if he could (he couldn't) and. Walton has at least secured a pass by composing an Elgarian brace. It seems odd that Vaughan Williams, whom one ought not to think of primarily as a symphonist, should have gone to the Beethovenian or Mahlerian limit. The whole nine, issued together on RCA Gold Seal (disc and cassette), give us a useful op- portunity for collective reappraisal. They are performed superbly by the London Symphony Orchestra under Andre Previn.
Why should one not think of Vaughan Williams primarily as a symphonist? Chief- 1Y, perhaps, because the materials of his idiom oppose the symphonic essence as revealed by the German masters and their Scandinavian successors: Sibelius and Nielsen. The symphony has to be tonal, and it has to be concerned with strenuous development of fragmentary donnees. It must also exploit contrasts of mood and tempo, preferably by division into separate Movements. Vaughan Williams was a Modal composer, and modes have a tenden- cy to change into each other. Accompany a theme with major common chords, which is One of Vaughan Williams's favourite devices, and there is no reason why you should not continue the theme with another Major triad beneath, and then another. The Principle of a key-centre, essential to the traditional symphony, is obscured. He was also a lyrical composer, with a tendency to imitate folk-song. As Constant Lambert said, there is no developing a folk-song: all You can do when you've played it is to play it again, somewhat louder. Nevertheless, Vaughan aughan Williams did — in at least two sYmphonies — forgo easy lyricism and Come close to the Beethovenian model.
His Fourth Symphony in F minor has analogies with Beethoven's Fifth. It is terse and has a triple-time scherzo with an elephantine trio leading through an underground tunnel into a triumphant epilogue — to which, however, is added an lmlogue (Vaughan Williams's contribution
to the form). Its basic themes are so elemen- tary as to suggest basic spatial concepts the vertical and the horizontal. It totally lacks rhapsodic divagations; it is concise and unified. In the Sixth in E minor, the home key and the one a semitone above provide a dissonance which drives the work forward, and this Phrygian clash is con- trasted with the hollowness of a tritonal in- terval. Neither of these two works is pro- grammatic, yet listeners have tried to see in the Fourth a prophecy of war, and in the Sixth a gloomy or sardonic commentary on the aftermath of war.
To look for an extra-musical meaning was probably inevitable. The first three symphonies — the Sea, the London and the Pastoral — are self-confessedly descriptive, the Fifth is related to his stage-work The Pilgrim's Progress, and the Seventh, the Antarctica, was developed out of music written for the film Scott of the Antarctic. Only the Eighth and Ninth, which seem to some to be devoted mostly to the exploita- tion of new sounds, have escaped a literary, pictorial or historical contagion. The Sea Symphony is a frank setting of Walt Whit- man — a wholesome influence on British choral writing, since his free verse counteracted the four-squareness which bedevils British music, which escaped Mendelssohn only to embrace folk-song. It remains a somewhat Parryesque work, with occasional Debussyan sonorities, pro- foundly moving. It bows to the formal ex- igencies of the classical symphony by being in four movements, complete with scherzo, but it can only be termed a choral rhap- sody.
A London Symphony also remains pro- foundly moving, and even disturbing, with a Finale opening in prophetic dissonance (it foretells the chordal motif in the Finale of the Sixth), but it shows a weakness which not even Elgar was able to surmount — the inability to construct a true first-movement development section (the Eroica is the pro- totype for all symphonists able to learn
from it). Vaughan Williams gives us his ad- mirable street-themes and then proceeds to a meditative lyrical interlude which, in slackening the pace and anticipating the mood of the slow movement, kills the sense of unity which is essential to an opening Allegro. And yet how moving are the sonorities of the slow opening, until the harp plucks the Westminster chimes, recall- ing the clock on the mantelpiece, and how well that mood is recaptured in the Epilogue of the tragic Finale.
What goes wrong in this work, and in so much music of the British renascence, is best summed up as lack of taste, meaning a tendency to descend from the sublime to the vulgar. The slow movement is heartbreak- ing until we hear a deformation of a lavender-seller's call — too descriptive, totally irrelevant to the mood — and the noctural Scherzo, which magically seems to invoke wet pavements, suddenly turns the whole orchestra into a nuge harmonica. Vulgarity may be excused in the first move- ment, and it is totally lacking in the Finale. But it comes back in the tritonal Scherzo of the Sixth, where, however, it has been solemnly excused as an image of modern life.
The originality of the Pastoral is somehow belied by its attempt to fill the traditional four-movement form, complete with Scherzo. Strictly, it is a work of one mood — that of Wordsworthian con- templation. The chordal polyphony is remarkable, the natural harmonic series sounded on brass quite magical, the voice used instrumentally deeply moving, and yet we are made uncomfortable by the strait- jacketing of rhapsodic material into the conventional shape of Vienna or Mann- heim. This is elemental music, without the bumpkin merrymaking the title, thanks to Beethoven, led its first listeners to expect. The symphonic form, glorifying either social stability or the composer's ego, is not right for pure landscape.
1 have played these works through in order and gained little impression of the kind of expressive necessity which forced Beethoven's concentration on sonata form. Vaughan Williams has things to say or- chestrally but disdained the free rhapsodic form which was best suited to his lyric and discursive genius. But these works are to be cherished rather than disdained (Europe, for the most part, does not know them well enough to scorn them). They are English in their distrust of logic, their tendency to divagate, their elevation of character and mood over form. They are also a little clum- sy; they lack French polish. They are, in a way difficult to explicate, about England. Even the Antarctica is more about nostalgia for green fields and cathedral evensong than its nominal mise en scene, and the Tudor harmonies cannot be expunged by the wind machine. Altogether the sym- phonies form a marvellous Golden Treasury for occasional dipping into. But they lack Beethovenian or Sibelian rigour. They are beautifully recorded.
©Anthony Burgess 1981
Previous page
