Symphony No. 4 (Vaughan Williams)

Ralph Vaughan Williams composed his fourth symphony between 1931 and 1935. Unlike his first three symphonies, it was not given a title: the composer said that it was to be understood as pure music, without any incidental or external inspiration. In contrast to many of Vaughan Williams's previous compositions, the symphony displays a severity of tone. It is in four movements, scored for a large orchestra.

The first performance was given at the Queen's Hall, London, on 10 April 1935; Adrian Boult conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra. There have been many recordings of the symphony, beginning with one made two years after the premiere featuring the BBC orchestra conducted by the composer.

Background

Towards the end of 1931 Vaughan Williams began work on a new symphony. His first (A Sea Symphony, 1910) had been for chorus and orchestra; his second (A London Symphony (1914) was purely orchestral; and his third (Pastoral Symphony, 1922) was for orchestra with solo singer. His widow, Ursula, wrote in her biography of him that the impetus to write a fourth came from an article in The Times.[1] In August 1931 the paper carried a retrospect of the previous week’s festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music by its music critic, H. C. Colles. He wrote of modern symphonies by composers offering abstract music as a reaction against programme music:

They all rely on the same order of stimuli. The hearer is prodded into activity by dissonance, soothed by sentiment, overwhelmed by the power of a battering climax. The appeal is primarily sensuous, even though the composer makes play with formal processes of thematic development, such as fugato, basso ostinato or variations.[2]

Colles added that possibly "the only thing to do is to make good music on an old principle".[2] On reading the article, Vaughan Williams said, "il faut qui je compose cela" (I need to compose this).[1] His three earlier symphonies had to a greater or lesser extent contained programmatic elements. For the fourth, the composer forwent any such content. Ursula Vaughan Williams wrote that he was "experimenting with purely musical ideas; no sea or city, no essence of the country was at the heart of this score".[1] And she and the composer's biographer Michael Kennedy have both said that the symphony contains an element of self-portraiture: "Many of RVW’s friends recognised in it his outbursts of temper and his gusty humour and ribaldry".[3]

While Vaughan Williams was working on the symphony his closest friend, Gustav Holst, died. Vaughan Williams had continually had support and advice from Holst while working on previous compositions and, in Ursula's words, "he felt the loss of that loving and critical mind more deeply than ever" while completing the new work.[4] Support came from the composer Arnold Bax (dedicatee of the symphony), the teacher and composer R. O. Morris and the conductor Adrian Boult.[4]

Premiere and reception

Boult conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the first performance, given at the Queen's Hall on 10 April 1935 and broadcast live by the BBC.[5] The work was enthusiastically received: the music critic Richard Capell reported:

An immediate impression was made on the Queen's Hall audience by this original, terse and masterly composition. There was no doubting the genuineness of the response. It may be said that the audience was really carried away by the extraordinarily effective scherzo and the strange reckless finale. [6]

Two of Vaughan Williams's younger colleagues, William Walton and Constant Lambert, are reported as calling the work "the greatest symphony since Beethoven".[7] The London music critics were divided about the stature of the work. Neville Cardus commented that although Vaughan Williams had once been "one of our purest melodists, drawing his simple accents from English folk-tunes", he was now the opposite. "His new symphony, played superbly to-night by the BBC Orchestra under Dr Boult, has many admirable orchestral qualities, but a man might as well hang himself as look in the work for a great tune or theme". For Cardus, the symphony was the composer's most concentrated work but lacked the humanity of the London Symphony.[8]

In The Times Colles said that the symphony "begins with excited harmonic gestures from which presently a great variety of tunes emerge" He called the slow movement "a lovely texture of wandering counterpoints" and said that the scherzo is "easily enjoyed by all and sundry at a first hearing, because it has humour which is sensitive in the opening theme and becomes broad when the tuba begins to caper in the Trio".[9] For Capell the work as a whole "is probably not Vaughan Williams at his greatest, for it does not represent his contemplative depths. But it is one of his most vivid compositions, and the intentions are carried out with the point and strength of a master-hand".[6] The anonymous reviewer in The Musical Times wrote:

[T]here can be no two opinions about the work. It is masterly. One has only to think of the average programme of contemporary music to feel how this symphony stands out among its kind. By those works you are bored, by this you are gripped. Those composers cudgel their brains for something to say in the new style. This composer knows what he wants to say and how to say it. He writes music that had to be as it is. Very rarely do we feel this sense of the inevitable – so familiar in the classics – when we listen to modern music. However the fact of its modernism be viewed, the modernism is never of the darksome, fourth-dimensional, understand-me-if-you-can order. It is daylight modernism, done with a clear brain and a sure hand.[10]

During rehearsals the composer himself said of the work, "I don't know whether I like it, but it's what I meant".[11] He later wrote to a friend, "I am not at all sure that I like it myself now. All I know is that it is what I wanted to do at the time".[12] He disclaimed attempts to interpret his music as a gloss on world events. The Fourth Symphony was being written while the Nazis came to power in Germany, and commentators including Hubert Foss and Frank Howes suggested that in Vaughan Williams's work "the prophet sees the nature of naked violence triumphant in Europe", in Howes's words.[13] Boult wrote that the symphony "brought many of us straight up against the spectacle of war, and the ghastly possibility of it. A prophet, like other great men, he foresaw the whole thing ... and surely there is no more magnificent gesture of disgust in all music than that final open fifth when the composer seems to rid himself of the whole hideous idea.[14] The composer would have none of this; he told a friend, "I wrote it not as a definite picture of anything external – e.g. the state of Europe – but simply because it occurred to me like this – I can’t explain why".[12] He later told the critic Olin Downes:

I don’t think I like it any more than you do, but that does not mean I’m sorry I wrote it. I somehow had to at the time, for what reason I don’t know; not certainly for the reasons given by some of my kind friends in the press: e.g., that it represented the turmoil of Europe at the moment or that I was trying to go one better than the mid-Europeans.[15]

Structure

The work is in four movements with the third and fourth linked:

  1. Allegro
  2. Andante moderato
  3. Scherzo: Allegro molto
  4. Finale con epilogo fugato: Allegro molto

A typical performance takes about 32 minutes.

Opening dissonance of the first movement:[n 1]

Germinal motive that develops out of the opening dissonance:

Motive built of fourths (measure 14–15):

Instrumentation

The symphony is scored for a large orchestra including: 2 or 3 flutes (2nd doubling on piccolo), 2 or 3 oboes (2nd doubling on cor anglais), 2 clarinets (in B♭), bass clarinet (in B♭) (ad lib.), 2 bassoons, contrabassoon (ad lib.), 4 horns (in F), 2 trumpets (in C), 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, side drum, cymbals, bass drum, strings.

Later performances, publication and manuscript

The American premiere was given on 19 December 1935 by the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Artur Rodziński.[17] The German premiere was on 8 January 1936 in Munich, conducted by Boult. The Australian premiere was in Sydney on 6 July 1937, conducted by Malcolm Sargent. The symphony was not performed in Canada until 2013; Bramwell Tovey conducted.[18]

The Oxford University Press published the score in 1935.[19] A grant from the Vaughan Williams Trust enabled the Department of Manuscripts of what is now the British Library to purchase the autographed full score of the symphony in 1960. The only autographed manuscript music by Vaughan Williams hitherto preserved in the department's own collections was the Concerto Accademico for violin and string orchestra of 1925, although the department also held the autographed full score of the Sinfonia Antartica on indefinite loan from the Royal Philharmonic Society. The manuscript of the F minor symphony contains several passages later discarded and numerous corrections by the composer.[20]

Recordings

The first recording, made two years after the premiere, featured the composer himself conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra in what proved to be his only commercial recording of any of his symphonies. It was released on 78-rpm discs in the UK by His Master's Voice and in the US by RCA Victor, and has been reissued on LP and CD. In his 1972 study of Vaughan Williams's symphonies Hugh Ottaway wrote that "for sheer ferocity" the composer's own recording remained unsurpassed.[21]

Conductor Orchestra Year Ref
Ralph Vaughan Williams BBC Symphony 1937 [22]
Sir Adrian Boult NBC Symphony 1938 [23]
Leopold Stokowski NBC Symphony 1943 [24]
Sir John Barbirolli BBC Symphony 1950 [25]
Dimitri Mitropoulos New York Philharmonic 1953 [26]
Sir Adrian Boult London Philharmonic 1953 [27]
Dimitri Mitropoulos New York Philharmonic 1956 [28]
Sir Malcolm Sargent BBC Symphony 1963 [29]
Leonard Bernstein New York Philharmonic 1965 [30]
Sir Adrian Boult New Philharmonia 1968 [31]
André Previn London Symphony 1969 [32]
Norman Del Mar BBC Scottish Symphony 1973 [33]
Colin Davis Boston Symphony 1973 [34]
Paavo Berglund Royal Philharmonic 1979 [35]
Bryden Thomson London Symphony 1987 [36]
Gennady Rozhdestvensky USSR State Symphony 1988 [37]
Vernon Handley Royal Liverpool Philharmonic 1991 [38]
Leonard Slatkin Philharmonia 1991 [39]
Andrew Davis BBC Symphony 1992 [40]
Bernard Haitink London Philharmonic 1996 [41]
Roger Norrington London Philharmonic 1997 [42]
Richard Hickox London Symphony 2001 [43]
Paul Daniel Bournemouth Symphony 2003 [44]
Leon Botstein American Symphony 2006 [45]
Sir Colin Davis London Symphony 2008 [46]
Peter Oundjian Toronto Symphony 2011 [47]
Carlos Kalmar Oregon Symphony 2011 [48]
Mark Wigglesworth London Philharmonic 2013 [49]
Robert Spano Atlanta Symphony 2014 [50]
Sir Mark Elder Hallé 2016 [51]
Andrew Manze Royal Liverpool Philharmonic 2016 [52]
Sir Antonio Pappano London Symphony 2020 [53]

Notes, references and sources

Notes

  1. ^ The composer Peggy Glanville-Hicks, a pupil of Vaughan Williams, later maintained that the opening bars of his symphony were taken from her Sinfonietta for Small Orchestra in D minor, but her biographer, Victoria Rogers, discounts the claim, as the sinfonietta postdates the symphony.[16]

References

  1. ^ a b c Vaughan Williams (1965), p. 190
  2. ^ a b "The New Music Festival: A Retrospect", The Times, 1 August 1931, p. 8
  3. ^ Kennedy (2002), pp. 5–6
  4. ^ a b Vaughan Williams (1964), p. 205
  5. ^ "Broadcasting", The Times, 10 April 1935, p. 12
  6. ^ a b Capell, Richard. "A New English Symphony: Vaughan Williams' Strong Work: Queen's Hall Public Carried Away", The Daily Telegraph, 11 April 1935, p. 12
  7. ^ Lloyd, p. 119 (Walton); and Heffer, p. 84 (Lambert)
  8. ^ Cardus, Neville. "The New Vaughan Williams Symphony", The Manchester Guardian, 11 April 1935, p. 6
  9. ^ "BBC Orchestra: Vaughan Williams's New Symphony", The Times, 11 April 1935, p. 12
  10. ^ "London Concerts", The Musical Times, vol. 76, no. 1107, May 1935, p. 452 (subscription required)
  11. ^ Ottaway, pp. 29–30
  12. ^ a b Kennedy, p. 247
  13. ^ Foss, pp. 137–138; and Howes, p. 3
  14. ^ Boult, Adrian. "Tributes to Vaughan Williams", The Musical Times, vol. 99, no. 1388, 1958, pp. 536 (subscription required)
  15. ^ Ross, Ryan. "Blaspheming Beethoven?", Acta Musicologica, 2019, Vol. 91, no. 2, p. 127 (subscription required)
  16. ^ Rogers, p. 30
  17. ^ "New British Work Given in Cleveland". Musical America. 10 January 1936. p. 6.
  18. ^ Kaptainis, Arthur. "Classical Music Review", Montreal Gazette, 12 March 2013
  19. ^ OCLC 933093683
  20. ^ Willetts, Pamela J. Vaughan Williams's Symphony in F Minor", The British Museum Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 1 (September 1960), p. 6
  21. ^ Ottaway, p. 31
  22. ^ His Master's Voice Red Seal 78s DB 3367–3370 (Abbey Road, 11 October 1937)
  23. ^ Pristine Classical PASC 626 (Studio 8-H, 21 May 1938)
  24. ^ Cala Records CACD 0528 (14 March 1943)
  25. ^ Barbirolli Society SJB 1064 (1950)
  26. ^ Music & Arts CD 1214 (Carnegie Hall, 5 April 1953)
  27. ^ Decca LXT 2909 (Kingsway Hall, 2–4 December 1953)
  28. ^ Columbia Masterworks ML 5158 (Columbia 30th Street Studios, 9 January 1956)
  29. ^ Carlton BBC Radio Classics 15656 91312 (Royal Albert Hall, 16 August 1963)
  30. ^ Columbia MS 7177 (Philharmonic Hall, 21 October 1965)
  31. ^ His Master's Voice ASD 2375 (Abbey Road, 22–23 Jan. and 12 February 1968)
  32. ^ RCA Red Seal SB 6801 (Kingsway Hall, 10–11 March 1969)
  33. ^ BBC Music Magazine MM 80 (BBC Studios, Glasgow, 24 August 1973)
  34. ^ BSO CB 100 (Symphony Hall, 26 October 1973)
  35. ^ EMI ASD 3904 (Abbey Road, 29–30 October 1979)
  36. ^ Chandos CHAN 8633 (St Jude-on-the-Hill, Hampstead, 27–28 November 1987)
  37. ^ Melodiya CD 10-02170-3 (Philharmonia Building, Leningrad, 28 October 1988)
  38. ^ EMI Eminence CD EMX 2192 (Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool, 8–9 March 1991)
  39. ^ RCA Victor Red Seal 09026-61194-2 (Watford Town Hall, 29 November 1991)
  40. ^ Teldec 4509-90844-2 (St Augustine's Church, London, December 1992)
  41. ^ EMI CD 5 56564 2 (Colosseum, Watford, December 1996)
  42. ^ Decca 458 658–2 (Colosseum, Watford, February 1997)
  43. ^ Chandos CHAN 9984 (All Saints Church, Tooting, January 2001)
  44. ^ Naxos 8.557276 (Lighthouse, Poole, 6–7 March 2003)
  45. ^ . ASO download 091 (Avery Fisher Hall, 7 April 2006)
  46. ^ LSO Live 0766 (Barbican Hall, 24 September 2008)
  47. ^ TSO Live 0311 (Thomson Hall, March 2011)
  48. ^ PentaTone PTC 5186 393 (Schnitzer Hall, Portland, 7–8 May 2011)
  49. ^ LPO CD 0082 (Royal Festival Hall, 1 May 2013)
  50. ^ ASO Media CD-1005 (Woodruff Center, Atlanta, 21–22 February 2014)
  51. ^ Hallé CD HLL 7547 (Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, 7 April 2016)
  52. ^ Onyx 4161 (Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool, 5–7 May 2016)
  53. ^ LSO Live LSO0867D (Barbican Hall, London, 15 March 2020)

Sources

Further reading

  • Barone, Anthony (Spring–Summer 2008). "Modernist Rifts in a Pastoral Landscape: Observations on the Manuscripts of Ralph Vaughan Williams's Fourth Symphony". The Musical Quarterly. 91 (1–2): 60–88. doi:10.1093/musqtl/gdn029.
  • Brown, Geoff (June 2001). "The Times, The Times, and the Fourth Symphony." Journal of the RVW Society, no. 21, pp. 29–31.
  • Gray, Laura (2000). "'I don’t know whether I like it, but it’s what I meant': Generic Designation and Issues of Modernism in Vaughan Williams' Symphony No. 4 in F minor." Studies in Music from the University of Western Ontario, nos. 19–20, pp. 181–97.
  • Harper-Scott, J.P.E. (2010). "Vaughan Williams’s Antic Symphony." In Matthew Riley, ed., British Music and Modernism, 1895–1960 (Ashgate), pp. 147–174.
  • Long, N. Gerrard (June 1947). "Vaughan Williams's Fourth Symphony: A Study in Interpretation." Monthly Musical Record, vol. 77, no. 887, pp. 116–121.
  • Ottaway, D. Hugh (November 1950). "Vaughan Williams's Symphony in F Minor." Hallé, no. 30, pp. 11–13.
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