Discovering Ralph Vaughan Williams – 1970’s style Part 2

At my school in the early nineteen-seventies, Britten, Berg and Bartok were the favoured composers. Anyone professing a liking for Elgar, Rachmaninov or RVW was generally laughed out of court. Alas, I had fallen in love with the Introduction and Allegro, the Second Piano Concerto in C minor and the above mentioned three small pieces by Vaughan Williams. It was a difficult secret to bear. 

One day I was talking to a former pupil at the school: he has since become a professor of music at a leading Scottish university and renowned instrumentalist. Amongst a lot of discussion about Berlioz’s Trojans, Wagner’s Ring and the music of the French harpsichordists, he offered me a loan of an LP of music by Vaughan Williams. It was the EMI recording (ASD2487, 1970) of An Oxford Elegy with John Westbrook narrating, Kings College Choir singing, and the Jacques orchestra conducted by David Willcocks. The couplings were Flos Campi and the Variations on Dives and Lazarus. These last two pieces had to wait a few more years before they became part of my Vaughan Williams’ Desert Island Dozen: it was An Oxford Elegy that “blew me away” as we used to say in those days.

Just why this work impressed and inspired me, would take many pages to expound – but three things spring to mind. Firstly, the words of the poem (two poems redacted) appealed to my fond imaginings of the English landscape. Although I had not actually been further south than Manchester, I had a well-defined notion of what I expected or hoped to find when I eventually arrived in the ‘Land of Lost Content.’  I had read A.E. Housman and W.H. Davies’ Autobiography of a Super Tramp. I was into the novels and short stories of H.E. Bates and the artwork of John Constable and John Piper. But the words of Matthew Arnold’s A Scholar Gypsy and Thyrsis struck the right chord, and they remain two of my favourite poetic works to this day. Secondly, I was impressed by the music: it is a subtle combination of choir – both wordless and text, impressionistic orchestral writing and beautifully narrated poetry. It is a near perfect fusion of words and music. And thirdly, although at that time I had not ‘close read’ the poem and was little interested in the spiritual crisis that beset the author, I enjoyed the exposition of the “oft read tale” from Glanvil’s book about the Scholar Gipsy and his wanderings in the Oxfordshire countryside. I too wanted to ‘roam on!’ through this landscape.

There are too many purple passages in this text but perhaps this extract will serve as an example of the sheer magic of the words: -

Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go?
Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on,
Soon will the musk carnations break and swell,
Soon shall we have gold-dusted snapdragon,
Sweet-William with his homely cottage-smell,
And stocks in fragrant blow;
Roses that down the alleys shine afar

And open, jasmine-muffled lattices...

Very shortly after hearing An Oxford Elegy, I wrote to ITV to ask what music had been used in the drama set during the nineteen-forties, A Family at War. I discovered that it was a theme from the first movement of Ralph Vaughan Williams Sixth Symphony. A few days later I bought the Decca Eclipse recording of Sir Adrian Boult conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra. It was to be my introduction to a more sinister side of the composer’s music. This was no rural idyll, but a bleak landscape once believed to be a premonition of a nuclear winter. It was a strange symphony to begin an exploration of the genre with, but at least it made me understand the sheer emotional breadth of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ music.

A year or so later, I made my way up to London for the first time. Certainly, much of the rural idyll seemed to exist as the Royal Scot train sped its way through the countrified parts of Staffordshire, Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire. But this soon gave way to suburban London and then the marshalling yards of Willesden and the carriage sidings of Euston Station. However, an hour or so after arriving in London I stood amazed and awestruck in the centre of Westminster Bridge looking down the river towards the South Bank, the Festival Hall and the Shell building. Walking across the road I saw the mother of Parliaments and the embankment heading down towards Lambeth and Pimlico and, out of sight, Cheyne Walk. That day I bought a recording of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ London Symphony: this too was a very different landscape to what I had imagined the composer specialised in creating. The journey had truly begun...

Concluded.

This essay was first published in the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society Journal in Issue 49, October 2010. I have made a few minor changes to the text.

John France August 2010