Music
Vaughan Williams
DURING the season which has just ended Vaughan Williams has given us two new works, a Suite for viola and orchestra and a . Symphony. No two compositions by one man could very well be more diverse, and the general comment heard after the first performance of the Symphony was that it was so unlike Vaughan Williams. Superficially the comment was just. In spite of his academic employment, Vaughan Williams is no academician in the sense that having successfully painted a picture of cows in a field, he continues for the rest of his life to paint cows in fields. The truly creative artist always cheats expectation, and it is only after a lapse of time that the likenesses of masterpieces by one hand appear greater than their differences. I imagine that to a contemporary audience Beethoven's Seventh Symphony must have come as a com- plete surprise after the " Pastoral," and even now the three last Symphonies of Mozart, composed though they were within a few, months, astonish one by their individuality, which overrides all similarities of idiom and personal style.
The Suite for viola, written (need it be said ?) for Mr. Tertis, was conditioned in its make-up by the limitations of the solo instrument. It is a slight work, making no pretensions to greatness. For that reason its real quality was, I think, under-estimated. Critics of painting do not nowadays despise the water-colours of Mr. Wilson Steer, because there is nothing on the paper but the thinnest wash of colour. Naaghan Williams's scoring in this Suite is the musical equiva- lent of Mr. Steer's technique. There is hardly anything there, but what there is " tells," because the instnunentation is applied with an exact knowledge of effect that is in itself astonishing. For Vaughan Williams's technique has sometimes seemed clumsy and fumbling. The only miscalculation here is in the Moto Perpetuo, which is ineffective because the viola, even when played by Mr. Tertis, inevitably sounds dry and scratchy In rapid passage-work.
If the Suite was a transparent water-colour, the new , Symphony in F minor is painted in oils with a heavy impasto, which an first acquaintance did not always seem to have been handled with the same mastery. The texture of the music is often as thick as that of the " London " Symphony, but until one kmows the work better, it is wise to remember that there was a time when the orchestration of Brahms's Fourth Symphony, seemed muddy. This is the first time that Vaughan 'Williams has issued a Symphony without title, but his
Pwitorat " Symphony, at least, only derives its name from the mood'and style of the music, and not from any descriptive details.. It the Symphony of a West-Countryman, as the London Symphony was, in the composer's own words, that of a Londoner, and fulfilled more truly than Beethoven's did the ideal of being inspired by a mood rather than by' any pictorial.'ideas.
The Symphony in F minor is at once robust and terse in manner. Vaughan Williams packs all lie has to say into the space of half an hour, and even in the slow movement there is little of that leisurely contemplation which- one had come to regard, on the strength of the corresponding movements in his Other Symphonies, as one of his idiosyncrasies. The whole is knit together by two themes of four notes each, out of which the material is constructed. The one is enclosed within the narrow compass of a minor third ; the other strides up by intervals of a fourth from F to G flat. It is the first of these themes which produces uncompromising harmonic results, that make some passages sound as " modern" as anything we have heard. Its fugal treatment in the Epilogue, which ' sums up the work, inevitably creates dissonances. The effect, however, is not one of perversity but of an austere strength.
These themes are in no sense " mottoes " arbitrarily used to give coherence to a poetic scheme. They are the germs from which, the music grows into many various forms, some of them frankly popular in their cut, others impressively dignified. It is a true Symphony in the sense that it is 'a microcosm of human experience, and an original one in that it is experience related at first hand in a form which has grown out of the material and not been superiinposed- upon it. It was the finnianity of the workthat overcame any doubts the audience may have felt about -its harmonic pungency 'and won for- it a
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