atddta 32: vaughn williams-1908-14

[grladams at teleport.com]

Vaughn William
Towards ‘A London Symphony’, 1908–14.  Grove Music online edition:

This period extends from the String Quartet in G minor and On Wenlock Edge 
– the immediate beneficiaries of Vaughan Williams’s study with Ravel – to 
Hugh the Drover, A London Symphony and The Lark Ascending, all 
substantially complete in 1914. The common ground is the assimilation of 
folksong, the confident use of a distinctive body of imagery, at once 
national and personal, and the achievement of a unified style. In most 
works, but not the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, there are traces 
of former ways, usually involving a chromatic expressiveness: only in the G 
minor Quartet (1908–9) and the Five Mystical Songs (Herbert, 1911) are 
these a serious handicap. At least five works from this period are among 
those that have proved most durable, and their popularity is not 
unconnected with their emotional background, which is stable and secure, 
however anguished the foreground. This ‘security’, though in part a 
reflection of the composer’s growing self-confidence, has much to do with 
the pre-war climate of Liberal optimism and the sense of community inherent 
in it. The most anguished foreground is in the finale of A London Symphony, 
but at the close, after a climax of harrowing intensity, the vision is 
‘contained’ by a warm G major chord throughout the orchestra. Similarly, 
the romance for violin and orchestra The Lark Ascending is wholly idyllic, 
and therefore different in feeling from the postwar pastoral works. The 
boisterous good humour of the suite from The Wasps (incidental music to 
Aristophanes’ comedy, 1909) is a more extroverted reflection of the same 
stable background. All these works are rich in expressions basic to Vaughan 
Williams’s maturity. Less well known, yet an especially beautiful product 
of this period, are the Four Hymns, for tenor, strings and viola obbligato 
(1914); significantly, these contain seeds of what lay just ahead, in terms 
of their particular musical realization of spiritual imagery. 

The achievement that most clearly transcends this period, however, is the 
Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis for double string orchestra (1910, 
rev. 1919). This is perhaps the first unqualified masterpiece; it is also 
the work that has travelled most widely. He was drawn to Tallis’s Phrygian 
tune when researching for The English Hymnal (see no.92) and found in it a 
grandeur and an intimacy which crystallized something essential to his own 
musical style: this way of writing for strings, though many times modified, 
may be traced as far as the Ninth Symphony. 




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