Is Vaughan Williams's construction of a substantial sonata movement at the outset of the Pastoral Symphony

Posted by admin · · Jump to comments

Is Vaughan Williams's construction of a substantial sonata movement at the outset of the Pastoral Symphony virtually without recourse to traditional methods of argument and contrast not, in its way, a rather remarkable technical achievement? Would one really want to shift or alter a single note of the radiant texture that suffuses the final pages of the Fifth Symphony? Maybe, for his own purposes, Vaughan Williams achieved a more complete, more professional mastery than he, or we, knew.`Vaughan Williams: Vision of Albion', a celebration of the composer's 125th anniversary, continues in London and Birmingham to 30 Nov. Yet Vaughan Williams's apprehension of the visionary was quite outside Britten's range and comes over to us with an equally powerful supra-personal tension in its constant interplay of awe and doubt.Does this suggest a final paradox? As Oliver Neighbour pointed out in an obituary article in 1958, most technically limited composers tend to remain miniaturists, yet Vaughan Williams was generally at his best on the largest scale - a propensity Neighbour attributed to his systematic evolution of his primary gift for sustained "stanzaic" melody. Such a view of the composer- performer as a medium could, of course, have risked inflation into a sort of priesthood. What saved Vaughan Williams from any such temptation was the profound ambivalence of his beliefs. He has been called a Christian Agnostic; his output is full of sacred projects and numinous intimations, yet it is by no means certain that he ever shifted fundamentally from the position of the liberal young man who shocked his fellow undergraduate Bertrand Russell with his atheism.Out of his technical virtuosity, Britten could doubtless do far more than Vaughan Williams, and his work is constantly braced by his profoundly personal immersion in the problems of innocence and experience.

For him, music was rather a means in the innately human search for what he called "ultimate realities"; and since these realities lay, in a certain sense, "beyond" the notes, it followed that technical perfection was of lesser concern in itself. When critics towards the end of his life began to carp at the "unhistorical" performances he led of his beloved Bach, Vaughan Williams roundly declared that what he sought to keep his performers and listeners in touch with were those musical and spiritual truths of Bach that transcended his historical time. One senses about his musical personality a constant urge to do more and to do it better than any of his contemporaries. And although one could hardly call him a self-expressive composer after the late-Romantic tradition of an Elgar, it is striking how many of his major works seem to turn upon problems and preoccupations of his own psychology.Vaughan Williams, on the other hand, though he might utter the odd riposte about Mahler being "a tolerable imitation of a composer" or whatever, seems to have had no fundamental concern for artistic competition whatever. But, in valuing amateur music-making for what he called its "unstrained quality", Britten evidently regarded it as a refuge from the pressures of professionalism which, partly out of his own nature and upbringing, partly out of the business basis of modern musical life, he appears to have conceived as overwhelmingly competitive.

After lunch, he went on to conduct the premiere of his own symphonic song cycle, Our Hunting Fathers, the most edgily brilliant and fiercely premonitory of all his early works. Despite the general discomfiture, Vaughan Williams came round to the back afterwards and continued to follow the younger man's work for the rest of his life. Britten was not to prove so generous, programming comparatively little Vaughan Williams at successive Aldeburgh Festivals.Not, of course, that he was oblivious of the older man's example in arranging folksongs, constructing large vocal works on the anthology principle, or writing for amateurs and children. Britten, who had recently spent an evening with his friend Lennox Berkeley guffawing over the "amateurishness and clumsiness" of Vaughan Williams's new Fourth Symphony, and who considered him an incompetent conductor, was prepared to concede the Five Tudor Portraits had had "a very successful show". Indeed, on 25 September 1936, the Norwich and Norfolk Triennial Festival unwittingly staged what might be considered a symbolic confrontation between the two musical viewpoints. Before lunch, Vaughan Williams conducted the first performance of his rumbustious suite for soloists, chorus and orchestra, Five Tudor Portraits, some of it evidently rude enough in words and music to outrage more stuffy elements in the audience as it delighted the rest.