Music
Early Tudor
Du. VAUGHAN WILLIAMS'S " Five Tudor Portraits," given for the first time in London at last week's B.B.C. Symphony Concert, is a setting of five poems by John Skelton, Rector of Diss, in Norfolk, who died in 1529. The date is important ; for one is apt to associate the word " Tudor " with Henry VIII and his children, rather than with the founder of the dynasty, and these poems belong to the days of Lady Margaret and her son rather than to those of Bluff King Hal, and have none of the elegance and finish of Elizabethan poetry. They belong, that is, to the late Gothic—not to the Renais- sance. The lines are uncouth and rough-hewn, as strong and long-lasting as a refectory-table. Like a child who has at last mastered a little grammar and is always picking up new words, Skelton revels in the joys of vocabulary, and, having an ear for sound as well as an eye for character, transforms a doggerel style into real poetry.
At first sight it might seem that these crude verses, four syllables long, with their quick rhymes, would be unfertile ground for a composer. But Vaughan Williams has not written two pages before he has convinced us that they are the best imaginable material for him. The very brevity of the lines emancipates the musician from the chains of more high-sounding lines, and the crudeness of the verse, with its frequent misplaced accents, gives him ample opportunities for variety of metre. Those who have the vocal score (pub- lished at the very moderate price of 3s. 6d. by the Oxford University Press) will sec how it works in the very first page of " The 'running of Elinor Rumming."
It was this study of a Tudor ale-wife, " droopy and drowsy, scurvy and lowsy, her face all bowsy," one imagines, that first set the composer's inspiration going. For its enormous gusto is the outstanding characteristic of the whole Suite, even in the two movements that provide a relieving contrast to the three boisterous character-studies of Elinor Rumming (there's boosiness in the very name !), John Jayberd, late Clerk of Diss, and Jolly Rutterkin, who comes roaring to town and paints it red. This last seemed the weak point of the work, a little too hectic in its rollicking and too slight to make the climax of a long composition.
The two quiet movements arc the obvious gems of the Suite ; the one a brief love-song of exquisite tenderness—the more tender for its underlying strength—with lovely, singable words ; the other a long dirge for a little girl's pet sparrow slain by " Gil), our cat." The Tudor girl, like the child of today, will have the funeral carried out with all due rites and ceremonies. So the late Philip Sparrow is laid to rest with candle and thurible to the singing of a solemn Requiem. The composer has thought it necessary to point out that there is no reason to suppose that Jane Scroop's grief is insincere or her childish representation of the Mass a mere burlesque. But they must be easily offended who find offence in this beautiful tale. When all the fowls of the air are summoned, to the accompaniment of a marvellously written bird-symphony to take part in the rite, one feels that the epic saga of Cock Robin has been raised to a higher plane of art.
If anything is more surprising than Dr. Vaughan Williams's versatility as a composer—he has contributed successfully to every form of music from Comic Opera and Ballet to Symphony and Mass—it is his vast scientific knowledge and his complete technical mastery. This mastery has been hard won and now he can bend any material to his will. Notice his exquisite treatment in " Jane Scroop " of the theme of the " Dies Irae," a tune so often hideously or pompously bur- lesqued by composers from Berlioz and Liszt onwards that one had vowed to damn any composer for merely using it. The birds, too, are individually characterised without slavish imitation of their calls in a highly wrought symphonic move- ment that never loses continuity of interest. Then with what musical skill ;the emphasis is on the adjective) he hanf..!es the tipsy maundering of a drunken slut in a solo, which must be extremely difficult for a singer in full evenbig-dress ! Miss Astra Desmond extracted every drop of rich humour from this strong ale, and Mr. Roy Henderson sang his love-song and his rollicking ditty in " Jolly Rutterkin " splendidly. The conductor, whom we must now learn to call Sir Adrian Bonk, secured a vigorous performance. DYNELEY HUSSEY.
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