Hinterland

Vaughan Williams wrote the theme music for his turbulent times. It’s time we recognised this titan

Is this the year we finally grasp the greatness of Ralph Vaughan Williams, born 150 years ago? Because many still don’t. The very fact he was an English composer continues to count against him, but not, perhaps, for the same reason as when his centenary was marked in 1972. Then, he was in the middle of a posthumous period of neglect (he had died in 1958) that seemed rooted not least in the critical belief that an Englishman – unless he were as cosmopolitan as Benjamin Britten – simply could not write great music.

Also, Vaughan Williams’s idiom was out of kilter with the prevailing vogue for atonalism, which Kathleen Ferrier famously dismissed as “three farts and a raspberry, orchestrated”.

Now, when it is fashionable for so-called intellectuals to suspect English culture because of what they consider its implicit racism, Vaughan Williams suffers for that reason, too. He embodied white privilege: an upper-middle class, Oxbridge-educated, white heterosexual man with a private income, he is the antithesis of the diverse fantasy that so many in the arts establishment, from the BBC downwards, strive to celebrate irrespective of any consideration of merit. This blind prejudice diminishes too much of the achievement of a man who has, at last and despite everything, become – almost by accident – one of the nation’s most popular composers.

But in Vaughan Williams’s sesquicentenary year, it is time to strip away all the prejudices, and indeed the somewhat superficial reasons for his growing popularity – such as Classic FM’s championship of The Lark Ascending, which in truth is not among his most profound works – and to examine why he is not merely a great composer, but one of Britain’s greatest cultural figures, to rank with Shakespeare, or Milton, or Dickens, or Turner, or Constable, or Wren.

The long-standing criticisms of Vaughan Williams range from the superficial to the ad hominem: that his music rarely strayed beyond the influence of English folk song, and that therefore it doesn’t travel; that he didn’t innovate because he was innately conservative; and that he was some sort of Betjemanesque bumbling old toff who, as a result, need not be taken seriously. None of this equates with the reality, which is that he wrote the turbulent theme music for the turbulent decades through which he lived. He gave the years from the 1900s to the 1950s the expression they demanded; he captured emotions, ideas, currents and feelings, depicting them in his music more universally than anyone else could.

It is a matter of record that Vaughan Williams set out to write a “national music” and that he drew some of the inspiration to do so from his collecting and study of English folk song in the decade before the Great War. Throughout his life the influence of folk song was apparent in some of his work – from the tunes he wrote for The English Hymnal in 1906, through The Lark Ascending in 1920, and the Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus in 1939. But folk song is even apparent in his film music from the 1940s, such as his score for Powell and Pressburger’s 49th Parallel; and it appears, briefly and by way of stark contrast, in one of the works that lays claim to be his masterpiece, the violent, disorientating and overwhelming Sixth Symphony.

And that brings us to the point about Vaughan Williams: he was an innovator, an experimenter, a man who absorbed the currents of what was going on around him and expressed it in his writing. Before the Great War he projected the then hugely pervasive influence of Walt Whitman in his A Sea Symphony and his choral work Toward the Unknown Region; he embraced the interest in Tudor polyphony in the Tallis Fantasia and his own experience as a man living and working in London in his London Symphony – or as he called it, his “Symphony by a Londoner”.

But then the war changed everything. His Pastoral Symphony, caricatured as “VW rolling over and over in a ploughed field on a muddy day” was in fact about the landscape, and the trauma, of the Western Front. His oratorio Sancta Civitas, finished in 1925, had a darkness that infused much of his music in the inter-war years and owed nothing to the

supposedly suffocating influence of English folk song. The percussive Piano Concerto and the ballet Job: A Masque for Dancing

– both from 1930 – and his unprecedentedly dissonant F Minor Symphony of 1935 continued to reflect a sense of doubt and fear, and an absence of the cheerful optimism that characterised the composer’s early work. In the age of the great depression and the rise of Hitler, he struck an appropriate tone; and it became more so by 1936 with the first performance of Dona Nobis Pacem, a cantata about the threat to peace being posed by the rise of fascism.

By the time war came again, he was the musical conscience of the nation, with a stature as a public figure unknown among British composers today. Throughout that war, and after it, he articulated the feelings of the people for whom he wrote, not just through his radically contrasting Fifth and Sixth symphonies, but finding a whole new audience through his film music – not least his score for Ealing’s 1948 epic Scott of the Antarctic, about another dimension of British endeavour.

But this musical achievement was not the component of Vaughan Williams’s moral greatness as an artist. His success, following on from Elgar’s, finally put British music on the map

internationally, with America especially devouring his work. Both through the example of his own music and through his teaching at the Royal College of Music, he nurtured the composers of the English musical renaissance – including Herbert Howells, Arthur Bliss, Jack Moeran, Gerald Finzi, Ruth Gipps and Stanley Bate.

He set an example, too, of wider amateur participation in music, leading the Leith Hill festival in Surrey with choirs from the neighbouring villages. He was one of those engaged in founding what became the Arts Council, and broadcast on radio and on film about the importance of music and of cultural life. His mission was not merely to write great works – which he unquestionably did – but to advance civilisation, not just in Britain but wherever his music his played. He was a great

Englishman, but also a great cultural figure who is increasingly appreciated internationally.

The emphasis on the commemoration of Ralph Vaughan Williams this year should be about the moral greatness that comes from such a commitment to art, and not just about the jolly tunes of his they play on Classic FM. Go out and listen to his music – and not just the obvious, popular favourites – and you will begin to see dimensions to this titan you had not thought existed.

He was out of kilter with the vogue for ‘three farts and a raspberry’ atonalism

i Britain’s musical conscience: Ralph Vaughan Williams in Surrey, 1949