Vaughan Williams’s Tallis Fantasia entices Gloucester
‘Aqueer, mad work by an odd fellow from Chelsea.’ Herbert Brewer’s comment on hearing the premiere of Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis undoubtedly ranks as one of the more flippantly dismissive put-downs in music history. Brewer was the organist at Gloucester Cathedral, where the Fantasia was first performed on 6 September 1910 as part of the Three
Choirs Festival. The new work was a Festival commission, and a large audience of 2,000 was present, mainly because Elgar was conducting his oratorio The Dream of Gerontius in the second half of the concert.
While Elgar drew heavily on the orchestral palette of 19th-century composers such as Wagner and Richard Strauss, Vaughan Williams looked much further back in time for his inspiration. As co-editor of The English Hymnal (published in 1906) he had come across a set of tunes by the English Renaissance composer Thomas Tallis, written
for the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Psalter (1567). One in particular caught Vaughan Williams’s attention – the tune to Psalm 2, ‘Why fumeth in sight: The Gentils spite, In fury raging stout?’
This solemn, timeless melody formed the basis of the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. The style of ‘fantasia’ Vaughan Williams adapted as a model was not the full-blown tone-poem of the Romantic era, but the more intimate type composers like Purcell and Locke had written for string consort in the early Baroque period. Vaughan Williams’s Tallis Fantasia was accordingly scored for strings only, using two main groups of players plus a quartet of soloists.
Vaughan Williams was 37 when he conducted the Fantasia’s premiere, and most of his major masterpieces were yet to be written. How would the audience react to this new piece by a composer whose reputation was in large part still to be established? Would a work which drew so obviously on the past strike listeners as disappointingly retrograde, compared to the ‘progressive’ music of Schoenberg and Webern?
Much of the reaction was, in fact, in the opposite direction. In the audience
Present and past: (left) composer Herbert Howells was smitten by the Fantasia;
(below) Thomas Tallis, VW’S Tudor inspiration
that evening were Herbert Howells and Ivor Gurney, both aspiring young composers. Howells was thunderstruck by what he heard in the Tallis Fantasia. ‘For a music-bewildered youth of 17’, he later wrote, ‘it was an overwhelming evening, so disturbing and moving that I even asked RVW for his autograph – and got it!’ Howells and Gurney walked the streets of Gloucester into the early hours that night, excitedly debating what the Tallis Fantasia might mean for the future.
Press reaction was enthusiastic too. The Manchester Guardian immediately recognised that the Fantasia was something special – ‘quite out of the ruts of the commonplace’, as its reviewer put it. The Daily Telegraph
‘For a music-bewildered youth of 17, it was an overwhelming evening’
agreed, calling the piece ‘extremely beautiful to such as have ears for the best music of all ages’. That timeless quality also impressed the critic of The Times, who found the new work ‘full of the visions which have haunted the seers of all times’.
These predictions that the Tallis Fantasia would stand the test of time have proved accurate. The work’s evocative string writing, drenched with memories of a golden past and luminous in texture, has gradually come to define the idea of ‘Englishness’ in music. It is surpassed only by The Lark Ascending in lists of Vaughan Williams’s most popular pieces. ‘The work has the solidity and grandeur of a cathedral, to which its strains seem to belong by a natural affinity,’ one commentator has written. ‘It has passed into the repertory of all the great orchestras of the world.’ Terry Blain