Building a Library
Terry Blain makes his choice of the best recordings of Vaughan Williams’s war-haunted Pastoral Symphony
The work
What did Vaughan Williams mean when he entitled his Third Symphony ‘Pastoral’? Pleasant, soothing, idyllically peaceful? With that title, the 49-year-old English composer certainly presented an easy target for his detractors, who viewed him as a fusty musical conservative.
‘Like a cow looking over a gate’ was fellow composer Peter Warlock’s withering verdict on the Third. ‘Staring at a cow for a long time’ opined Stravinsky, adopting the same bovine imagery. Is A Pastoral Symphony really just another tired example of what Elisabeth Lutyens referred to as the ‘cowpat school’ of English music, full of ‘folky-wolky melodies on the cor anglais’?
Vaughan Williams thought that it was more than that, and he met the ‘cowpat’ critics head-on in his own comments on the symphony. ‘It’s not really lambkins frisking at all, as most people take for granted,’ he later wrote pointedly in a letter to his future wife Ursula. ‘It’s really wartime music.’
Vaughan Williams’s experiences of war were not those gleaned by reading about it in newspapers or listening to radio broadcasts. Though 41 when the First World War began in 1914, he volunteered for active service and worked as an ambulance orderly in France, transporting wounded and dying soldiers back from the frontline fighting. ‘I used to go up night after night with the ambulance wagon at Écoivres,’ he remembered. ‘We went up a steep hill and there was a wonderful Corotlike landscape in the sunset.’
That terrible juxtaposition – of slaughter unravelling amid the implacable beauty of the French countryside – is crucial to understanding the music of A Pastoral Symphony, and its vision of a world laid waste by human savagery and conflict. The sights and sounds Vaughan Williams experienced in France ‘incubated’, as he put it, and eventually found their way into the work, which he began writing when the conflict was over. A bugler he heard practising is poignantly recollected in the doleful trumpet solo from the second movement. The turbulent, lumbering atmosphere of the third movement strikes an unmistakable note of militaristic menace and foreboding, while the wordless soprano lament of the finale appears to symbolise a loss and suffering that goes beyond verbal expression.
The opening movement seems, by contrast, comparatively calm and placid – ‘almost entirely quiet and contemplative’, was Vaughan Williams’s own description. Yet palpable uncertainties haunt the music. Woodwind figurations break loose from the delicately spun orchestral textures, hovering in fragile isolation. Dark bass lines are an uneasy, stalking presence, and harmonies shift eerily like mist swirling.
‘I sometimes dread coming back to normal life with so many gaps,’ Vaughan Williams had written to his friend Gustav ★olst as his period of wartime service ended. Those gaps are palpable in the opening movement. The atmosphere is strangely disembodied and uprooted, as though nothing has quite the reassuring sense of solidity and certainty it possessed previously.
Vaughan Williams was acutely aware that his new symphony was different to the more confident, extroverted symphonies that preceded it – A Sea Symphony and A London Symphony, both completed before World War I had started. ‘It’s in four movements and they are all slow,’ he told the conductor Adrian Boult, a lifelong champion of his music. ‘I don’t think anybody will like it much.’
To mitigate the potentially sleepy impression he worried his ‘four slow movements’ might make, he encouraged Boult, who conducted A Pastoral Symphony’s premiere in January 1922, to use faster tempos than he had originally intended. ★e later relented, telling Boult that slower speeds were possible, as ‘I realise that it isn’t so boring to people as I thought it was going to be.’
The Pastoral has, in fact, become one of Vaughan Williams’s best loved symphonies, perhaps because the trauma and tragedy reported in its darker pages is counterbalanced by moments of visionary beauty in the music, and by a doughty refusal to buckle under the weight of human suffering – something that would resurface in his Fifth Symphony, composed during World War II.
For Vaughan Williams, the First World War changed forever what he understood by ‘pastoral’. The landscape of the Third Symphony no longer resembled that of the idyllic Lark Ascending, composed shortly before war broke out. Ripped by shrapnel and defiled by military savagery, the ‘Corot-like’ vistas had lost their prelapsarian innocence. A Pastoral Symphony mourns that loss of innocence, while tentatively trusting in the possibility of a more peaceful future.
A bugler that VW heard practising is recollected in the doleful trumpet solo