Vaughan Williams and his World: The 33rd Season of the Bard Music Festival
Eleven programs of performances, panel discussions, and preconcert talks concerning the composer, his teachers, contemporaries, students, and legacy, August 4–6 and 10–13.
The Bard Festival Chorus, The Orchestra Now, The American Symphony Orchestra, with various vocalists; instrumentalists; ensembles; and conductors, including Leon Botstein, James Bagwell, and Zachery Schwartzman, plus The Bouwerie Boys Morris Dancers.
Ralph (pronounced “Raif”) Vaughan Williams (1872–1958), coming to music relatively late and without demonstrated talent, began his career composing in the late-Romantic style following studies with two pillars of Victorian music, Charles Villiers Stanford and Hubert Parry, along with the German Max Bruch and, later, Frenchman Maurice Ravel. Although a professed non-believer, his interest in English music and friendship with Gustav Holst led him to devise a new hymnal using fresh material, often based on folk tunes and original melodies. The festival began with an audience sing-along of his own hymn, “Down Ampney Way,” to underscore the composer’s lifelong commitment to community engagement.
The first weekend of the Bard Music Festival traced Vaughan William’s development, from early songs and piano quintet; through the powerful pre-war song-cycle “On Wenlock Edge” for tenor, strings, and piano and “Tallis Fantasia” for double string orchestra (1910); to the important post-war scores of Violin Concerto (1925), “Job-a Masque for Dancing” (1930), and finally Symphony no. 4 (1935). One way to view his development is as a movement from the pastoral style, associated with nostalgia and idealism, to a wider stylistic range, including neo-baroque (Violin Concerto) and dissonant modernism (4th Symphony), along with an original amalgamation of styles represented by “Job.” The second weekend illustrated the diversification of his activities: two programs of choral music, some of it meant for religious observances (despite his “non-believer” status); performances of two of his late symphonies (one stemming from a film score); a program demonstrating links to European music; and, finally, a performance of his comic opera “Sir John in Love,” based on Shakespeare’s “Merry Wives of Windsor.”
As it has done in the past, the Bard Music Festival sought to reframe the way we think about the composer. It challenged wide-spread assumptions about his music: that it is parochially English and privileges the English audience which has special access to its message by virtue of nationality alone, and that it is a form of conservative or backwards-looking modernism that does not participate in the innovative and bold developments in 20th-century music, in which Stravinsky, Bartok, Schoenberg, and others participated. In challenging these (often implicit) assumptions, Bard’s programmers had to address and even illustrate the sources of these assumptions in their choice of works to be heard. In doing so, they revealed that, although there are kernels of truth in these assumptions, they require much qualification and, ultimately, refutation.
Vaughan Williams was, in fact, proudly “national” in all aspects of his project, but his approach was ultimately parallel to that of Bartok, whose Second Rhapsody was included in the next weekend’s programs. Both composers collected, assimilated, and re-used folk materials in highly original ways, a form of sharing of national musical character accessible to both English and non-English audiences, and more authentically based than the exotic impressions of such popular romantic works as Mendelssohn’s “Scotch” Symphony, Rimsky-Korsakoff’s “Shehérèzade,” or Ravel’s orchestral songs of the same name. A long list could be made of similar examples—readers are free to draw up their own. For Bartok, Vaughan Williams, and others of their generation, folk sources needed to be discovered through fieldwork since they were not known in their authentic forms to the educated elite who were the producers and consumers of “art music.” They needed to be incorporated into compositions through new technical practices that acknowledged the ways folk materials differed from the language of music as taught in conservatories and practiced by mainstream composers. For Vaughan Williams, that meant observing and utilizing modes (or irregular scales) rather than—or alongside of—tonal scales. Such modes were also recognized as characteristic of pre-modern (i.e. renaissance or medieval) music, including that of the 16th-century, Tudor-period composers, which provided another source for the development of nationally based styles by Vaughan Williams and many of his contemporaries and students. This was exemplified by the “Capriol Suite” (1926) by “Peter Warlock” (assumed name of the composer Philip Heseltine), which is a modern reworking for string orchestra of five dances taken from a 16th-century dance manual.
Vaughan Williams’ approach to style challenges assumptions about what we mean by “modernism” in music. His breakthrough piece, the one which marked the clear emergence of his individual voice, appeared at the age of 38. Born in 1872, he only came to his vocation in his 20s, and he took another decade or more to find his own voice. This took place in 1910 with the premier of his “Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis,” performed on the opening program of the festival. Although not dramatically iconoclastic like “The Rite of Spring” of three years later, the “Fantasia” was, in its own way, quietly revolutionary. A product of a fruitful period of study with Maurice Ravel, it illustrated what he had learned: to stamp a composition with a unique sonic, acoustic profile. There is no precedent for the “Fantasy”: It is as if he (and we) are listening to Tallis’s 1567 hymn tune in the echoing acoustics of a great old cathedral and also echoing down the three-plus centuries of historic time, not only as an artifact of the past, but as a message to awaken an old-yet-new sense of beauty and devotion. The unique forces are an unequally divided double string orchestra, with the smaller group acting as an echo of the larger, and a solo quartet echoing the smaller one. The hymn tune was originally modal, and it is preserved in that form. The harmonization and elaboration uses Tallis’s original with its flowing and irregular rhythms, including its “floating” phrygian mode, but the harmonic practice is otherwise one that Vaughan Williams would employ based on Debussy and Ravel, of chords, often simple triads, in parallel motion, providing the deep resonances that generate the large acoustic spaces of this and later works.
Vaughan Williams’ critics acknowledge that his style progressed and diversified in response to ongoing processes of change in England, such as the shrinking of open and cultivated land in the countryside and rapid urban growth, particularly of London, which he commemorated in his “London Symphony” (no. 2) of 1913, as well as the post-war shrinking of the empire. But this process accelerated after he had experienced the crucible of the war first-hand as an ambulance driver on the western front. An example of expanded musical language was the neo-baroque Violin Concerto of 1925, in a convincing performance by soloist Grace Park. Accompanied by strings alone, this was clearly modelled on Bach, using a rather severe version of pulsating baroque rhythm and motivic economy, but otherwise adhering to modally restricted harmonies. More indicative of the post-war modernist tendency are two works of the mid-“20s”: “Flos Campi” for solo viola, wordless chorus, and orchestra, based on texts from “The Song of Songs” (1925) and the dance-theater piece “Job,” structured around William Blake’s etchings illustrative of that story (1927–1930). In the former, new, chromatic dissonance is associated with the sensuality and ardor of the biblical poetry, with the sinuous viola solo, powerfully rendered by Luosha Fang, representing the Shulamit, the object of Solomon’s desire. Unlike the self-indulgent sensuality of Vaughan Williams’ contemporary Frederick Delius, represented by the meandering impressionistic forms of his Violin Sonata no. 2 (1923) or the inconsequential “Two Aquarelles” (1932), Vaughn Williams draws his portrait of sensual experience in a more objective aesthetic idiom. As in “The Lark Ascending” (1914/20), the use of a solo string instrument is linked to expressions of natural desire—human and otherwise. “Flos Campi” aims at a greater psychological depth and risks challenging and expanding the listener’s sense of the complexity of human impulses. Given Vaughan Williams’ life-long dedication to community-building through music as shared experience, this was a major step.
Two landmarks of Vaughan’s career followed, in both career and festival, “Job” being the first. This “masque for dancing” was offered without its dance components (originally designed by his cousin, Gwendolen Raverat), but with the projection of the Blake images which inspired it and to which it is linked, scene by scene. There is little obvious choreographic accentuation, save for Satan’s material; otherwise, the music suggests smooth, sweeping motions or pure stasis, as is the case for Job himself, who was to remain immobile throughout. It is not surprising that this work was rejected by the Ballet Russes: Its scenario was found to be “‘too English’ and ‘too old-fashioned.'” Divided into nine scenes or tableaux, each except the first accompanied by one or more of the Blake etchings, the combination of music, image, and story radiates an indefinable aura of vast and mysterious forces at play, which are brought to bear on the fate of a single individual. Blake’s images capture his own belief in the magical and invisible beings that surround us. The figures of God and Satan compete as equals with the patience of Job weighing in the balance and deciding the outcome. Vaughan Williams avoids conventional dance tropes, although Satan’s dance comes closest to the kind of international modernism that Vaughan Williams was beginning to incorporate (perhaps influenced by Kashchei’s “Infernal Dance” from Stravinsky’s “Firebird”). There is no triumphalism accompanying the conclusion; this is a poised, mystical, ritualistic drama composed by a non-believer (or at least non-participant in traditional religion) who nevertheless is deeply committed to the story’s human and metaphysical aspects.
The culmination of the “modernization” of Vaughan Williams’ style was his Symphony no. 4 of 1931-1934. To those who are only familiar with his “greatest hits,” this can be a shocker, as it was for members of the British cultural establishment. Unlike the two works just discussed, which are episodic and proceed from one vivid sonic image to the next, this is a work of tightly argued symphonic discourse, built on a non-tonal motive of only four notes, and worked out with a high degree of tension and contrast.
While its atmosphere reminded me of nothing so much as Ruggles’ “Suntreader,” it also bears a temperamental and structural resemblance to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, including moments of grotesque humor (as in Beethoven’s solo passage for double-basses in the scherzo). Its “shocking” levels of dissonance provoked many questions for the composer himself, who is supposed to have said, “I don’t know if I like it, but it is what I meant.” It has been linked to a reaction to post-war disillusionment, loss of empire, and forebodings about rising European dictatorships; but Vaughan Williams said something like, “Can’t a man sometimes just feel like writing a symphony?”—a bit like Freud saying, “Sometimes a cigar is just a smoke.” While assigning specific content to it may be specious, there is no question that it has an unsettling power that offers no comfortable resolution but displays the composer at the height of his powers. Hearing it was a thrilling experience.
Other works from that time or later helped to fill out the portrait of this composer, one more varied, complex, and wide-ranging than previously imagined. This includes an uneven, gruff, and strangely put-together Two-Piano Concerto that nevertheless appealed (in its earlier one-piano incarnation) to no less a judge than Bela Bartok; it also includes two important chamber works, the Second String Quartet (1942-44) and the Violin Sonata in A minor (1953).
The quartet, convincingly performed by the Parker Quartet, provided an example of the full range of emotions and styles that the composer commanded by the middle of World War II. It integrates widely varied stylistic gestures into an original dramatic scenario featuring the viola as protagonist. It was composed as a birthday gift for violist friend Jean Stewart, who performed in its premier. Viola solos provide bookends for each movement. In addition, the composer prescribes an unusual seating arrangement which exchanges the positions of viola and second violin so that the viola’s sound has more prominence, with its f-holes facing the audience. Its foregrounding becomes most dramatic in the scherzo, where the viola is the only unmuted instrument. Bartok’s Sixth Quartet may have provided a precedent for opening a quartet with a viola solo, but the viola retains its primary role throughout the work, providing another example of a string instrument as stand-in for the composer’s own voice. The character and order of the four movements is also unusual, setting up a dramatic arc that seems highly personal, expressing responses to the fraught historical moment.
In the short first movement, “Allegro appassionato,” the viola’s angular melody leads to an angry, uncharacteristically tense exchange with the other strings. This is followed by a quieter, mournful song eventually taken up by the whole group. It develops intensity and eventually leads back to the opening angry mood, which seems to have gained a sense of defiance. The mournful mood returns, led this time by the first violin, but eventually the viola briefly resumes its (her?) lead role before dropping out and leaving the upper strings to rise to a conclusion.
The second movement, “Romance,” is the longest of the quartet. It also uses novel sonorities, calling for very quiet, non-vibrato playing which empties out the sound and makes a spooky impression as the instruments enter in a fugal style, one at a time. This sets the stage for the dramatic contrast of a rich second theme played “espressivo” in full, seven- and eight-note chords (performed, of course, with vibrato), a hymn-like passage reminiscent of Vaughan Williams’ familiar lush string writing. The viola resumes its role as first among equals, punctuating the hymn with personal comments and then leads a more flowing contrapuntal discourse building to a powerful unanimous statement before the viola returns to opening material, but without its ghostly sonority and pulling its harmonically wayward colleagues back to the home key. (The strategy of a conclusion which vacillates between two unrelated harmonies was soon to be used to powerful effect in the conclusion of the post-war Symphony no. 6.)
The third movement, “Scherzo,” is texturally the most original, with all but the viola muted and playing tremelo, and on the bridge (‘sul ponticello’). The effect is startling: more spooky than the second movement’s opening, as if the viola is being assaulted by a swarm of insects (perhaps a reflection of the experience of being caught in the blitz). The viola’s theme, four obsessively descending notes in whole-tones at the bottom of its range, is marked “Theme from ‘The 49th Parallel.’” This was Vaughan Williams’ first film score (of five), from 1940, a propaganda effort depicting a German U-boat astray in Canadian waters whose crew tries to get across the border to the then-neutral United States. (The point was to demonstrate the need for the United States to enter the war on the right—i.e., British—side). The viola maintains the lead throughout, even as the others take up its melodic material and assume a more normally balanced sonority, reaching for a powerful unanimity, echoing the process of the preceding movement at a higher energy level and, finally, returning to the initial color and mood.
By this point, it is clear that there is some form of narrative unfolding from movement to movement. This is confirmed by the title of the final movement, “Epilogue.” It is a short “Andante sostenuto” whose modal melody harkens back to Vaughan Williams’ pastoral mood, with the lead role passing from viola to first violin in a mood that grows increasingly peaceful, arriving at a final section “sub[ito] tranquillo” (“suddenly peaceful”), sung simply by the first violin in D major with gentle harmonies and repeated very quietly before the viola’s final benediction.
As the descendent of works like “The Lark Ascending” and “Flos Campi,” Vaughan Williams’ personification of the solo string instrument here seems to speak for him in his role as a public composer, recognizing an individual sensibility but linking it powerfully and essentially to the community and to communal experience.
Along with the survey of Vaughan Williams’ work, the festival sampled music by his predecessors, contemporaries, and students, forming a significant number of diverse musical voices, all of which cannot be accounted for in this review. But revelatory works that merit mention include: a mature, lyrical, and romantic Clarinet Quintet (1895) composed by the 20-year old Samuel Coleridge-Taylor; a vigorous, passionate, and beautifully crafted Piano Quartet (1936) by Vaughan Williams’ student, Herbert Howells (old-fashioned in language but full of its own form of originality and drama); Michael Tippett’s jazzy, folksy, and unexpected Piano Sonata no. 1 (1938/42) brilliantly performed by Orion Weiss; and Benjamin Britten’s devout, quirky, humorous, and ultimately moving choral cantata “Rejoice in the Lamb” (1943) setting the poem “Jubilate Agno” by the “mad” 18th-century poet Christopher Smart, who depicted “the various forms in which God manifests himself in the world: a cat, a mouse, letters of the alphabet and musical instruments.”
However, the final event of the festival merits special attention: a successful semi-staged performance of Vaughan Williams’ opera “Sir John in Love” (1929), based on Shakespeare’s “Merry Wives of Windsor.” Despite its status as one of the Bard’s lesser endeavors, or perhaps for that reason, it has been a source of opera libretti for Salieri, Nicolai, and particularly Verdi’s culminating masterpiece, “Falstaff.” Vaughan Williams may have identified with Sir John and sought to give some positive spin to the character who is treated with more contempt in the play. One way he did this was with a title that suggests Sir John was indeed motivated by love, even though his machinations were set in motion by greed. More significantly, the opera is steeped in a light-hearted spirit of folk song and dance, including a setting “Greensleeves” from which his eponymous and popular orchestral work derived. Some of the most beautiful moments are reserved for the young couple, Nan and Fenton, who are genuinely in love and whose marriage celebration concludes the work with a chastened and benevolent Falstaff offering the blessing. Although this description seems to indicate a reversion to Vaughan Williams’ pastoralism, the operatic writing reveals a mastery of musical storytelling and specifically of dramatic use of the voice. Other elements treated with ingenuity and skill are the ensembles, the integration of the chorus, and the smooth dramatic flow from recitative to aria to ensemble and ensemble with chorus. This, along with strong casting and playing by the American Symphony Orchestra under Leon Botstein’s direction, made for a completely satisfying afternoon of musical theater, ending the festival on a joyful note.
