Nationalism in Music
Ralph Vaughan Williams. By Hubert Foss. (Harrap. 12s. 6d.) MUSICAL nationalism has receded, by the middle of the twentieth century, into that historical region where all the old battles of the past—Wagner versus Brahms, Twelve-Noters versus the Rest— continue to be fought out by atm-chair strategists, while the actual fighting has moved to another front But in making " Englishry " one of the key points of his plan and devoting a whole chapter of his book to the English background Mr. Foss has acted in the spirit of the composer whom he is studying. Indeed, Vaughan Williams' own contribution to the book—a short but revealing chapter of musical autobiography—bears scars of the old fights for recognition, echoes of old bitternesset as well as of present contentment. In those few pages the veteran composer tells us his preferences, and Mozart, Beethoven, Berlioz and Mahler, absent from the list, come in for varying degrees of disapprobation, ranging from cool respect to implied contempt. Whether Mr. Foss was right in taking seriously Parry's egregious remark to the young Vaughan Williams—" Write choral music as befits an Englishman and a democrat "—is more doubtful. Parry himself was hardly a democratic character, and his own choral music, which has never crossed the Channel, has now virtually ceased to appeal even to his own countrymen, while the best of Vaughan Williams' own work—the last three symphonies, the Tallis Fantasia, Job, Flos Campi—is neither choral nor " democratic."
The nationalist note is pitched high by Mr. Foss when he claims that " in Dowland's short pieces can be found a melancholy un- attained by the elaborations of the third act of Tristan and Isolde," and that the English are possessed of " a sense of loyalty unique among peoples " (shades of perfidious Albion!). In fact, while it can safely be said that this book will please many of Vaughan Williams' English admirers, in its whole-hearted admiration for both the man and his music, it will not be so successful in the mission-field of English culture beyond the Channel., If Vaughan Williams' music is really, as Mr. Foss seems to suggest, so intrin- sically connected with the English language, the English countryside and the English way of life, foreigners may well continue to think it a private taste of the English people, no more to be acquired by the rest of the world than a taste for English cooking and the English weather. This is to diminish the status of a composer in whose finest utterances the national element is only incidental and often unnoticeable. Mr. Foss does indeed say so, but much of the writing of this book is pitched in so intensely nationalist a key that the reader's general impression can hardly fail to be of the composer's " Englishry " almost as much as of his musical greatness.
MARTIN COOPER.
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