THE NUMBER NINE seems to be fatal to symphonists. Beethoven,
Bruckner, Mahler—they all reached it, and none passed it. And now Vaughan Williams, only a few months after the first performance of his ninth symphony, is dead. 1 have been lucky to be at the first performances of his last four sym- phonies, and watched the bulky body grow succes- sively more stooped as he walked to the platform to acknowledge the ovation. But there was nothing stooped about the music, from the dizzying tumults of the sixth to the light-hearted delicacy of the ninth. His place in English musical history is secure, of course, though he has been oddly neglected on the Continent, where they prefer Sibelius. My own view, for what it is worth, is that at least two of his symphonies stand above anything since Brahms, and that his reputation will increase with the years. It was a graceful and appropriate tribute to his memory that the Halle Orchestra, which gave so many of VW's first per- formances, should rearrange its Prom on the night he died and begin with the Tallis Fantasia (the BBC broke into its schedules, too, to broadcast the performance and the moving words with which Sir John Barbirolli prefaced it). My happiest memory of him is from the first night of his opera The Pilgrim's Progress at Covent Garden in 1951, be- fore an audience containing the two archbkhops and a large number of lesser clergy. The final scene ends with a huge tableau in Heaven, after Pilgrim has crossed over; when the cast took their bows the angels stayed in position, as it was too difficult for them to descend quickly to the stage. So when the composer came on to take his bow we were treated to the delightful sight of the Heavenly Host applauding vigorously. I daresay that on Tuesday the trumpets sounded for him, too, on the other side.
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