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The later symphonies
Abstract
Contexts for the later symphonies: One of the most striking aspects of Vaughan Williams’s long career is his late flowering as a symphonist. When the composer turned sixty in 1932, he had three symphonic works to his name: A Sea Symphony, completed in 1909; A London Symphony, which dates from 1910–14; and A Pastoral Symphony, composed during and after the First World War. Between 1934 and 1957, Vaughan Williams completed six further essays in the genre, establishing himself as one of the great twentieth-century symphonists and contributing vitally both to the consolidation of British symphonism and to the reorientation of the genre after Mahler away from central Europe and towards the Slavic, Scandinavian, Francophone and Anglophone contexts. Charting this progression is, however, neither historically nor analytically straightforward. The direction the symphonic cycle would eventually take is, for instance, not easily inferred from the first three symphonies. As a multi-movement cantata, A Sea Symphony is closer in conception to Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 or Rachmaninov’s The Bells than to any of Vaughan Williams’s subsequent essays in the genre; A London Symphony prefigures the programmatic aspirations of the Sinfonia Antartica, but not its technical means; and although many features of A Pastoral Symphony are carried forward in later works, as a whole it gives only a sketchy indication of the later symphonic idiom’s expressive and technical range.
The chronic lack of investment in the capital needed to foster the development of music during the period of colonial governance in Ireland and the early years of the Free State, combined with Ireland’s peripheral position in relation to the centres of musical modernism, resulted in composers in Ireland adopting modernist ideas at a very late stage, particularly in comparison with the chronology of Irish literary modernism. Previous literature on the subject of Irish musical modernism has frequently obscured any clear sense of the real extent of this delay through the conflation of the concept of “modernism” with styles that may have been perceived by Irish contemporaries as “modern” at a particular historical juncture. This essay surveys the work of the key figures of twentieth-century Irish composition, examining the degree to which they may or may not have been interested in or engaged by international ideas of modernism. It re-evaluates composers frequently regarded as modernist in the literature such as Frederick May, Brian Boydell and Seán Ó Riada; discusses the important of Seóirse Bodley’s work from the 1960s; and posits the idea of an Irish avant-garde emerging in the 1970s. The essay concludes by noting the continued relevance of modernist ideas for a number of today’s composers.
Sibelius's Fifth is one of the great late-Romantic symphonies. In this searching account, based on a wealth of new information, James Hepokoski takes a fresh look at the work and its composer. His findings have implications beyond Sibelius himself into the entire repertory of Post-Wagnerian symphonic composition. The early chapters place the Fifth Symphony squarely within the general culture of European musical 'modernism' and focus in particular on the problem of the clash of that culture with the more radical 'New-Music' experiments of an emerging younger generation of composers. Subsequent chapters include a probing consideration of Sibelius's style and meditative aesthetic; an account of how the symphony was composed; and a descriptive analysis of the final, familiar version. The book concludes with a discussion of the composer's own prescribed tempos for the Fifth Symphony, along with a comparison of several different recordings.
It must have been in 1968 that I found myself sitting with a group of fellow undergraduates in Professor Wilfrid Mellers’ first-floor study in the music department of the new University of York. At that time the department was in two elegant former town houses in the centre of the medieval city. It was spring or early summer and shadow-patterns of leaves moved across the walnut-coloured grand piano by the window as Mellers played and talked his way through Tapiola , weaving his own magic spells with words about ecstasy, terror and infinity and echoing with cryptic grandeur the concluding sentence of his piece on Sibelius in Man and his Music : ‘Perhaps we have to “go through” Tapiola in order to live again.’ At the end we listened to the whole piece on record, the mood of enthralled absorption disturbed only by a colleague's insistence that Sibelius should have ended it in B minor. But Mellers had persuaded us that we were listening to an unequivocally ‘great’ work which he had once, he told us, learned to score-read all the way through at the piano. We were, of course, being introduced to Tapiola little more than ten years after Sibelius's death in 1957 – a point emphasised by the uncorrected tense in Mellers's Man and his Music (first published in 1962): ‘in the thirty years that have elapsed since he wrote Tapiola he seems to have created no music of consequence’. Mellers had clearly devoted himself to the study of Tapiola during the composer's later, silent years, when Sibelius's reputation in Britain was still unshaken by the critical implications of a more contemporary ‘new music’ and the pending inrush of American and continental avant-garde experimentation. Devotees of such experimentation in the 1960s would find in Mellers one of their most significant educational gurus, but his pioneering music course at York was defined by its stylistic and historical diversity.
The debt of Walton's First Symphony to Sibelian models of symphonic form is often acknowledged, but the debt's wider implications are seldom considered. The inter-war English idolization of Sibelius may help to explain why Walton should use characteristic Sibelian procedures such as rotational form, heavy dependence on pedal points for structural purposes, and focus on a sound-sheet or Klang—however individually Walton treats these devices—but it does not account for all that is interesting in this moment in British musical history. In this article a richer context is drawn by locating Walton's Sibelianism in a more general contemporary artistic concern with what Michael Saler calls 'the myth of the North': an inter-war emphasis on the industrialized north of England. This 'myth', a development of modernist preoccupations with the relationship between technology and humanity, is reflected both in what Jed Esty calls an 'anthropological turn' in writers such as Eliot and Woolf (a turn to a romantic nationalism), and in Heidegger's philosophy of art—connections that open up a range of ethical and political considerations. After presenting an analysis of the Sibelian technique of Walton's symphony alongside discussion of its thematic treatments of nation, cultural, and geographic environment, and the changing antagonisms of late modernism, this article reconsiders the historical significance of Walton's music, and reads it as a presentation of views on authentic community and the place of England in the twentieth century.
From the late 1950s onwards, significant parts of the British musical establishment became involved in vigorous proselytizing activity on behalf of the later work of Arnold Schoenberg. Over the next three decades, as many as half a dozen distinguished British writers on music produced books devoted to the explanation of this difficult repertory to non-specialist audiences, books that have become only too familiar to generations of students taking compulsory courses on the Second Viennese School. Employing a variety of sociological and analytical methods, I provide close readings both of these texts and of key passages from that most intractable and unloved of Schoenberg's serial compositions, the Violin Concerto, Op. 36. The aim is to deliver a thorough critique of the ideological presuppositions informing British attempts to popularize music of this kind, attempts that can now safely be said to have failed.
Vincent d’Indy played a central role in the development of the symphony in fin de siècle France. He lobbied the Conservatoire to add it to its curriculum and, after founding the composition programme at the Schola
Cantorum, he became the first in the nation to lecture systematically on the symphony; he gave students a historical overview
of the genre as well as practical lessons on how to write such works. He conducted contemporary symphonies on numerous tours
both in France and abroad. Two of his own symphonies influenced future directions—the first being based on a folksong, the
other by using the medium of the symphony to proclaim a philosophical message. Three notable symphonists of the next generations—Albéric
Magnard, Albert Roussel, and Arthur Honegger—studied with d’Indy; each adopted a distinctive approach to the symphony, but
all three bear various traces of d’Indy’s legacy as a teacher and as a composer of symphonies.
This article attempts to reconstruct the persona of the ‘Old Shostakovich’ in Britain—the pre-Testimony Shostakovich that is now a distant memory. Through examining widely disseminated sources such as newspaper reviews, radio
broadcasts, articles in popular magazines, and programme notes, it traces Shostakovich's reception history in a culture that
effected a shift from staunchly defending music's independence from politics to insisting upon political readings of Shostakovich's
music. The reconstruction of the history of Shostakovich's British reception charts a range of changing attitudes: critical
responses to the role of music in society; Britain's growing awareness of the social and cultural effects of Stalinism; and—most
important—Shostakovich's developing stature as his music became more frequently played. Given the scale of this task, the
article focuses on the reception of the Fifth Symphony, arguably the work that has accumulated the heaviest layer of interpretative
commentary and has been the most controversial in Britain from its first performance there in 1939 until the present day.
Contemporary Chronicle: Revaluations: Vaughan Williams
- Mitchell
Music, Ice, and the Geometry of Fear’, and also Michael Beckerman, ‘The Composer as Pole Seeker: Reading Vaughan Williams’s
- Grimley