BELA BARTÓK (1881 – 1945)

BACKGROUND TO THE SERIES ON THE 20^TH CENTURY CONCERTO

Back in the very early 1950’s the name to strike terror when talking about modern music was Bartók, rather like Stockhausen today. It was with trepidation that I borrowed some 78’s of Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra from the record library and how courageous I thought myself to listen to it. Nowadays it presents no problem at all. I have previously written specifically on his ballet “The Wooden Prince” and I have expanded that note so as to accompany Matthew’s programme on his concertos.

Bartók was a Hungarian. But even to say that begs a question because Hungary had a habit, not of its own choosing, in changing its size and borders and exact whereabouts from time to time and the part of Hungary where Bartók was born is now in Rumania. All of these areas were part of Austro-Hungary, a two state – one kingdom power broken up in 1919 by the Versailles Treaty. Take for instance his popular Five Rumanian Dances for violin written in 1915, just before The Wooden Prince. These were dances from Transylvania, an area of Rumania taken over by Hungary in 1867. Thus the Rumanian Dances were home to Bartók much as Woolwich once might have been to Arsenal.

 Bartók was born into a musical family and received good piano training from his mother from when he was four. When he was seven his father who had been a head teacher died and his mother moved to Pressburg, now Bratislava in Slovakia. He gave a first public piano recital there when he was 11 including compositions of his own. In 1898 he turned down an offer from the Vienna Conservatory, but chose instead to stay in Hungary at the Budapest Academy where he first met Zoltan Kodaly. His early work was influenced greatly by Richard Strauss and Liszt. His first major work, Kossuth written in 1903 is a long tone poem written following his hearing the first performance in Budapest of Strauss’s “Also Spracht Zarathustra”. Kossuth depicts the deeds of a Hungarian hero of the 1848 revolution.

In 1907 Bartók became appointed professor of piano at the Budapest Academy. This would allow him freedom of time to continue his compositional activity, as well as his researches to reproduce the authentic in the pursuit of what he termed ethno- musicological studies. He began collecting folk music by recording musicians on wax cylinders, carried out in conjunction with Kodaly, much as Vaughan-Williams and Holst were doing with English folk music. This had a profound impact on Bartók’s compositional style, for in these pieces he found elements that he began to incorporate into his own writing. These folk tunes, removed from the traditional major/minor tonality of Western music, provided new lines of melody and harmonies, and their asymmetrical rhythms became a hallmark of Bartók’s rhythmic style. It became immediately obvious to him that Hungarian folk song with its pentatonic scales had nothing in common with the gypsy music popularized by Liszt in his Hungarian Rhapsodies or Brahms in his Hungarian Dances. These were about as genuine as those Rumanian accordionists one sees on the Paris Metro. Bartók and Kodaly went on to compile and publish a volume of the songs they had collected. These encompassed a number of ethnic traditions both near at hand and further afield, Transylvanian, Romanian and stretching to Anatolia.

He wrote the first of his six string quartets in 1908 which, like his piano pieces, takes in these folk sounds. The new great emerging modern influence of the time was Debussy and certain aspects were absorbed by Bartók whilst developing his own distinctive Bartók sound. He wrote his only opera, “Duke Bluebeard’s Castle”, in 1911. During the Great War Bartók he wrote his ballet, “The Wooden Prince”. His reputation at this stage stemmed more from his concert performances as a pianist than as a composer. Meantime his own music grew tighter, more concentrated, chromatic and dissonant. His sound world was modernist but although a sense of key is sometimes lost in individual passages, Bartók never went along with atonality. 1919 saw the break-up of Austro Hungary and a brief Bolshevik revolution in Hungary. It was soon replaced by a near Fascist takeover to which Bartók was always opposed. He earned some notoriety when the Nazis banned his ballet The Miraculous Mandarin written in 1918–19 but not performed until 1926 because of its sexually explicit plot.

His international reputation grew throughout the 1920’s and 30’s. His Dance Suite was written in 1923 to celebrated the 50th anniversary of the unification of the two cities, Buda and Pest with a symbolic chain bridge across the Danube. In 1927 he wrote the first of his three piano concertos, the piano part of which is noticeably and notably percussive in nature. Bartók actually directed in the score “The percussion (including timpani) must be placed directly behind the piano” and the kettle drum can be clearly heard as if in partnership with the piano . For Bartók the piano was in essence a percussion instrument and this was his own distinctive style of that period.

The second piano concerto followed in 1931 and is more dense. Bartók created his own blend of sonata form, which involves a kind of mirror-recapitulation, with the reprisal of the opening material in the correct sequence, but with each theme in mirror form as well as played back to front. Much of Bartók’s music was seen as difficult, a trait it must be admitted of his own making. The Danish composer Carl Nielsen met Bartók at the time that Nielsen was writing his sixth symphony. Now this work started off simply enough but ran into trouble of its own. Nielsen was experiencing difficulties in his private life at the time.  Nevertheless Nielsen was somewhat depressed when Bartók asked him, “Mr Nielsen, do you think my music is modern enough?”

Bartók’s second period, his most modernist, had begun with the end of the first world war when he, underwent a period of expressionism and barbarism probably influenced by Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. This radical phase of his output lasted until 1926 followed by an easing in his style which became leaner and formally tighter. It included three of the cycle of six string quartets he wrote, which could be described as uncompromising, yes, but so were the last quartets of Beethoven for that matter. He remained resident throughout in Hungary always an arch opponent of the fascists. He refused to be the soloist when his own music was played in Nazi Germany. His feelings towards them were reciprocated.  

His third period could be said to have begun with his “Music for Strings Percussion and Celesta” in 1936/7 commissioned by the wealthy Swiss conductor Paul Sacher for the tenth anniversary of his Basle Chamber Orchestra. It is written for double string orchestra and takes a neo-classical turn. It opens in a fugal style which owes much to Bartók’s study of Bach but makes no attempt to sound like him. It owes nothing however to Stravinsky whose own neo-classical concerto Dumbarton Oaks was written the following year and makes every attempt to sound like Bach. The title of the work does not mention the word piano but there is a prominent role again for this instrument amongst the percussion. The third movement could be music of the spheres with an odd xylophone introducing it followed by glissandi effects on strings and on timpani. Its last movement recalls some of his early Rumanian folksong. Bartók was again championed by Sacher who commissioned the Divertimento in 1939. In between came his sonata for two pianos and percussion and his violin concerto (now known as No 2) written in 1938 for Zoltan Szekely which some consider his finest work. This final period reveals a more approachable side to Bartók . Don’t get me wrong, Bartók was not going to suddenly become a populist. He was coming in from the impenetrable. His style would remain searching serious and shadowy but deliberate mystification would be shed. Now he no longer seems to be seeking to shock but often to be communing with himself.

His last string quartet was written in 1939 and with his going to America might well have ended up as his last work. Bartók had come to realise that he could no longer stay on in Hungary. He had sent on his scores to America where he and his second wife sailed to in 1940. He was just in time. The Hungarian Government joined in the war just afterwards… on the side of the Axis.

To begin with Bartók considered his stay in the U.S. not so much as emigration but as exile. He did however take up American citizenship in 1945 just before his death. Although he was considered one of the greatest concert pianists of his day there was little demand for concert performance by him. One benefit for him was his appointment as professor at Columbia University where he was able to study its large collection of Serbo-Croatian folk music. He lacked any incentive to continue with composition. The Bartóks lived in relative obscurity in New York. They had a small income from royalties and lectures but added to this he became ill and was diagnosed with leukaemia. Being America, to obtain good treatment one needed to be able to afford to do so. Being America, the American Society for Composers, Authors, and Publishers paid Bartók’s medical expenses. It was then that Serge Koussevitzky, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra stepped in to make a decision which gave the musical world one of its greatest legacies. Previously Koussevitsky over the years had arranged commissions of numerous composers. Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition; Rachmaninov, Roussel; Honneger’s Pacific 231; Prokofiev’s fourth symphony and the first of Martinu’s six symphonies after he had arrived in America also in 1940. Closer even to home came the financial backing in 1942 to Benjamin Britten, then holed up in America, for Peter Grimes.

Now in 1943 came the commission from the Koussevitsky Foundation for Bartók to write a concerto in memory of Koussevitsky’s wife, Natalie. It was not written for any one solo instrument nor for any particular concertante group of instruments but to be a concerto for orchestra. It would be designed for the orchestra to show itself off, just as a soloist might, in switching between its various sections. It was a work which was right up the street of the streamlined American orchestras of the time and it turned out to be Bartók’s greatest success, not that he would live long to savour that result. Written in five movements it is in all but name a symphony. Now Bartók was never a barrel load of laughs but the fourth movement demonstrates to us for the first time that he actually had a sense of humour. The Hungarian sounding serenade gets interrupted and we are propelled into Colney Island and all the fun of the fair. The trombones join in with most un-Bartók like deep raspberries before the fairy tale resumes. For sheer excitement the last movement sets off with a huge whirlwind of strings sounding almost like a hundred and one gipsy cimbaloms or zithers. The sounds become wilder with the entry of the brass, reminiscent in some ways of the sounds of Janacek’s sinfonietta.

The Concerto for Orchestra rekindled, albeit briefly, Bartók’s creativity. In 1944 he composed a sonata for solo violin, written for Yehudi Menuhin. His last major work was the third piano concerto which includes bird calls and sounds of nature. This was written with the playing of his wife in mind. The piano writing is no longer percussive but quite gentle. His viola concerto was unfinished at his death, and completed by his long time pupil, Tibor Serly. These late pieces caught the spirit of the approaching end of the second world war. They remain Hungarian influenced, but here and there one has the feeling there is an added American dimension and that a fusion has grown between Hungarian folk modes on the one hand and the blues on the other. A touch of Benny Goodman perhaps!

On September 26, 1945, Bartók died in a New York hospital. He was buried in New York. In 1988, with the iron curtain raised, his remains were transferred to Budapest. There, a statue of him was erected in front of the Unitarian Church to which he belonged..

FRANCIS POULENC (1899-1963)

In his series on the Twentieth century Concerto Matthew is devoting one lecture to three concertos by the French composer Francis Poulenc to represent the 1920’s and 30’s, Concert Champêtre, a harpsichord concerto written for Wanda Landowska (1929), the double piano concerto (1932) and the concerto for organ timpani and strings (1938). Poulenc is an undervalued composer demonstrated by the fact that in 2013, big years for Verdi (200^th anniversary) and Britten’s centenary, there was little on show to commemorate the death fifty years previously of probably the most entertaining and most melodic of composers since Mozart.

To begin with let’s get the name right. It is not, as often pronounced, Pool (as in puddle) ONK (as in klaxon horn) but Pull (as in pullover) and ANC (as in Anchor). His father was one of the founders of the pharmaceutical company Poulenc Frères, later to become the industrial giant Rhône Poulenc. Now I do not know whether Sir Thomas Beecham ever conducted anything by Poulenc. He should have done so, as much of Poulenc, Les Biches for example, could have turned out to be first rate Beecham lollipops. The interesting connection is that Beecham too had a father who also founded a pharmaceutical giant, in his case with pills to relieve constipation.

Francis Poulenc was born in Paris in 1899 and was educated at the lycée Condorcet. There wasn’t anything spectacular about his musical beginnings. His mother first taught him the piano from the age of 5. His uncle introduced him to vaudeville and other popular aspects of Parisian theatre. From 1915 he took piano lessons from Ricardo Viñes through whom he got to meet Satie, Debussy and Ravel. He was 18 when he gained his first success, his Rapsodie Nègre, a bluesy work for solo baritone voice, string quartet, piano, flute, clarinet and piano. This was enough to block any entrance to the conservatoire but its success came to the attention of Stravinsky who had it published in London, something for which Poulenc remained grateful. This connection would lead in 1924 to Poulenc meeting Diaghilev which led to the commission for the ballet, Les Biches.

Meantime back in 1917 Satie had formed around him the small group including Honegger, Milhaud and Auric called Les Nouveaux Jeunes which would metamorphose into a new group led by Jean Cocteau with the name of Les Six. It included also Germaine Tailleferre and Louis Durey and Poulenc is said to have been included without being consulted. At the time he was serving on military duty from 1918 to 1921 and had remained young enough just to miss the war. Satie had dropped out, may be because Cocteau had taken over. The ideal of Groupe de Six was to re-act against German romanticism (Wagner) and French impressionism (Debussy and Ravel) although the later Ravel was moving into much the same spirit. That spirit was that of Chabrier and a back to Français basics as developed by Satie as in his Parade of 1917. Another inspiration was the poet Guillaume Appolinaire, who invented the concept and name of surrealism. Poulenc had first met him at a leftist bookshop in 1916 and would set to song a number of his works as well as the opera Les Mamelles de Tiresias. Apollinaire who suffered head wounds on the Western Front died on 9^th November 1918 not from war wounds but the Spanish flu. The name of Les Six was chosen by the critic Henri Collet based on the name of the Russian nationalist Groupe de Cinq. Like them it had one who slipped below the horizon. For the Russians it was Cui. For the French it was Durey. The French had an extra man, or rather a woman, Germaine Tailleferre whose harp concerto is a delight. The fact is that the group had very little cohesion and it was less a school than a publicity stunt to attract attention with each going his/her separate ways. The six collaborated twice, first with an Album of piano pieces and then in a ballet, Les Mariés (« the bridal couples ») de la Tour Eiffel, devised by Cocteau with music by five of them. Durey had dropped out to pursue his socialist ideals. The ballet is a surreal wedding party on the Eiffel Tower where appear a cyclist, someone chasing an ostrich, a lion and a sea bather.

Poulenc was largely self taught and described his music as instinctive. He was aware that something more was needed. He took lessons from 1921 to 1924 with Charles Koechlin, an eccentric composer proud of his Alsace origins but who did not acquire the fame of that of Arsene Wenger. Koechlin settled in Villers sur Mer in Normandy. His output was enormous and included orchestral settings of Kipling’s Jungle Book – I have to say I prefer the Kipling – and, as well as watching all the films at his local cinema, writing also music suitable to accompany Greta Garbo, Ginger Rogers and Douglas Fairbanks.

Now in 1924 Diaghiliev’s attention had been drawn to Poulenc. Diaghilev sought from Poulenc a new ballet for the Ballets Russes’ Monte Carlo season as a modern sequence to Les Sylphides by Glazunov. The subject did not appeal to Poulenc who came up with the proposal for Les Biches, not an easily translatable title. A biche is a doe, the female deer, a slang term also for certain coquettish women. Poulenc chose to base his work on paintings of Watteau that depicted Louis XV and various women in his deer park, “Parc aux biches”. He described the work as a “contemporary drawing room party suffused with an atmosphere of wantonness”. It represented a 1920’s contemporary house party – the bright young things – with the sexual identity of its characters intended to be ambiguous. This was right up Diaghilev’s street. It was choreographed by Nijinska. It was also Poulenc’s entry into neo-classicism. Stravinsky had previously introduced this movement with Pulcinella based on pieces by Pergolesi but here Poulenc went further, plus royaliste que le roi, quoting and dressing up several composers in the same work including Scarlatti, Rossini Tchaikovsky and Mozart, so fast that before you can think, where have I heard that before?, you are fast plunged into the next quote, and to cap it all Poulenc quotes from Stravinsky’s own Soldier’s Tale. What chutzpah indeed! Les Biches remains Poulenc’s best known work, fun, catchy and always tasteful.

In 1926, Poulenc would meet Pierre Bernac, a fine baritone and teacher. He gave the first performances of the Chansons gaillardes in 1926. The two began appearing in recital and recording with Poulenc as the accompanist in 1934 and they continued performing together until Bernac withdrew from performing in public in 1960. Poulenc wrote the majority of his songs for Bernac. Their musical relationship might be compared to Britten and Pears but whilst Poulenc himself was openly gay their relationship does not seem to have encompassed this side of Poulenc’s life.

In 1927 Poulenc had met Wanda Landowska, famous for her playing of the modern harpsichord at a time before the baroque revival and period instruments. Landowska was responsible for the composition of several other new pieces of music for the instrument, notably the harpsichord concerto of Manuel da Falla and his puppet theatre play “El Retablo de Maese Pedro” at the first performance of which she and Poulenc met. She demanded of him a concerto for her. She was a dominant woman to whom one could not say no. The Concert Champêtre (the Pastoral Concerto) was the result. This is the first of three concertos which Matthew will be dealing with in his lectures. Landowska said she “adored” playing it as it made her “insouciant and gay!” It is typically maverick of Poulenc that he pits the harpsichord against the combined resources of a full orchestra whilst in his later organ concerto he balances the much more powerful organ against only timpani and strings. The work is in three movements and as usual includes typical Poulenc cheeky chappie tunes. It is interspersed with reveille horn calls said to have been heard by Poulenc from the barracks at the nearby Chateau de Vincennes. Why pastoral? Chateau de Vincennes, where Landowska was living, is at the end of Line 1 of the Paris Métro and about as near as Poulenc would get to be a rustic. The work itself is a skittish combination of the baroque and Stravinsky.

The concerto for two pianos was written in 1932 and played (and later recorded) by Poulenc with his childhood friend Jacques Février. It was written in two months and first played at an ISCM festival at Venice. It contains both high spirits and thoughtfulness. There is an especial section where there is a clear Balinese influence. Poulenc had heard Balinese music in the Paris Expo of 1931 and, like Debussy before him and Britten after him, the introduction was revelatory. Its neoclassical tag derives from the second movement which is a loving tribute to Mozart. One feels the tune to be a slow movement taken from one of Mozart’s own concertos but I had to play all 27 of them before realizing it was pure Poulenc.

The organ concerto, like the double piano concerto, was commissioned by Princess Polignac in 1934, as a chamber orchestra piece with an easy organ part that she could manage herself. However Poulenc abandoned this idea for something much more grandiose and ambitious. He wrote to Jean Françaix, “The concerto is not the amusing Poulenc of the Concerto for two pianos, but more like a Poulenc en route for the cloister.” Following the death of his friend and composer, Ferroud, in 1936 Poulenc went on a pilgrimage to the Black Virgin of Rocamadour where he would rediscover his father’s Christian faith. This reconversion added a religious dimension to much of the music he would write including also his incomplete organ concerto. Poulenc never having composed for the organ before would study works of Bach and Buxtehude which reflect in the work’s neo-baroque leanings. The darker hues of the organ concerto clearly reflect the new religiosity, a serious side to Poulenc’s personality but having been completed in 1938, the year of the Munich crisis, I just wonder if, like Martinu’s double concerto, it reflects also the gathering storm.

From now on there will be the Janus side of Poulenc’s character. Alongside the fun and games of the twenties and thirties with Poulenc sharing friendships and associations with the likes of Jean Gabin, Edith Piaf and Maurice Chevalier he was able to release a number of devotional works including a Stabat Mater, his Gloria, his Litanies à la Vièrge Noire. It made him a more complete composer. One saw the same with his friend of the period, Sergei Prokofiev who could also switch between buffoonery and deep seriousness. Yet with Poulenc there remains in his most spiritual of works a touch or brushstroke somewhere of the other Poulenc who can still display the humour of his alter ego.

The war years did not interrupt his activities. In 1941with Durey and Auric he joined the national Front of Musicians organized by the French communist party. The following year he wrote a humorous ballet, Les Animaux Modèles, based on fables by La Fontaine in which he included the tune of an old popular song “You’ll Never Have Alsace and Lorraine”, an act of defiance unrecognized by the Germans. On the other hand he wrote “Figure Humaine” in 1943 but, with its conclusion called Liberté, it had to wait till 1945 for its first performance in London. At the end of the war he wrote Babar the Elephant, every bit as popular as Paddington Bear and, orchestrated by Jean Françaix, worthy of a place alongside Peter and The Wolf and The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.

With the post-war years it was back to Apollinaire with the surrealist opera-ballet Les Mamelles de Tiresias urging women to make babies – women’s lib was more than a decade away – and this put the mockers on it for the first two sopranos cast for the role who each became pregnant!. This was old Poulenc of the profane variety. In stark contrast there followed his opera The Carmelites concerning nuns of that order during the French Revolution, each of whom is guillotined in a chilling sequence. You takes your choice. Poulenc and Bernac embarked on several American tours. For his second visit to the States Poulenc wrote his delightful piano concerto although it was not what American audiences expected despite his slipping in “Way Down Upon the Swanee River”. Poulenc never wrote a symphony but he did write his sinfonietta on a commission from the BBC to celebrate the first anniversary of the Third Programme in 1947. It is a little back to Les Biches and a work played far too little.

Throughout his career Poulenc wrote chamber music, not your common or garden string quartets or sonatas but usually music for one or two wind instruments accompanied always by piano with works dedicated to Prokofiev and Honegger.

Francis Poulenc died from a sudden heart attack aged 64. For him fun had been a way of life. What Constant Lambert said of Chabrier would have been more appropriate for Poulenc, “He was the first important composer since Mozart to show that seriousness is not the same as solemnity, that profundity is not dependent upon length, that wit is not always the same as buffoonery, and that frivolity and beauty are not necessarily enemies” . One could add that no-one in modern times could write a better melody than Francis Poulenc. He, more than anyone else, was the tunesmith of the twentieth century.

Lastly, apart from his wit and charm many of the critiques and programme notes I have read refer to Poulenc being so Gallic. I have to question this adjective particularly since my dear French wife once commented “What is Gallic when it’s at home? No-one in France would know what you are talking about”. It is true. It happens only with music, not painting. The impressionist painters were French but for some reason composers, like Fauré and Ravel amongst others, are attributed with a Gallic quality. There is Gallic wit, Gallic esprit, Gallic verve and Gallic élan. We don’t refer to Britten as ever so Anglo Saxon nor Hamish McCunn’s Land of the Mountain and Flood as being so Celtic. The only object of culture which can lay claim to the term Gallic is the Asterix Theme Park. I did Caesar’s Gallic Wars for my ‘O’ levels and I can tell you that old Julius never attributed wit, esprit, verve or élan to the Gauls. The next time I read yet another programme note referring to Gallic I will send it back to its author marked “Gallic, mon cul”.

RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS O.M – (Knighthood Declined) (1872-1958)

 Ralph (pronounced Raif) Vaughan Williams (RVW) is a completely different barrel of English cider than the other composers I have written about. All composers are different but some have traits in common; others are just more different. Everything is different about him apart from his musical training which was bog standard orthodox. Yet here is a composer who is regarded as quintessentially rustic English. Little wonder for someone born in a Gloucestershire village called Down Ampney. His father, Arthur, was the rector; his mother, Margaret, a suitable subject for TV’s “Who do You Think You Are?”, was an offspring from two famous families, the Wedgwoods and the Darwins, who had frequently previously intermarried. She was a direct descendant of Josiah Wedgwood whilst Charles Darwin was a great uncle who frequently visited.

If during the course of musical succession the relay baton got handed down from Haydn and Mozart to Beethoven, Brahms through to Dvorak and was about to be taken up by Elgar, this did not apply to RVW. At the end of the nineteenth century musical nationalism was sweeping through Europe, intermingling folk dances with classical structures. Others were content to write their trepaks and mazurkas, their polkas, Slavonic Dances and Hungarian Rhapsodies, their Ma Vlasts and Patries, and all at a time when England was being bashed as “Das Land Ohne Musik” with no sign of any emergent English national movement. And RVW assumed this mantle by quite different albeit artificial means. After Charterhouse he had studied at the Royal College of Music under Parry absorbing the English choral tradition and Beethoven quartets; he had gone up to Cambridge to read history and music whilst continuing weekly studies under Parry; after graduating he returned to the College where he studied under another giant pillar of Victorian establishment, Stanford. During this second period he met fellow student, Gustav Holst with whom he would always remain close. The two of them developed an interest in the English folksong, travelling the country and recording down on paper old songs that had been passed down, much as Kodaly and Bartok would do in Hungary. The English folk song and its particular musical modes would interest and absorb RVW for the rest of his life.

In 1897 he married Adeline Fisher, a talented cellist and pianist and cousin of Virginia Woolf, but they never would have any children. She suffered from arthritis and their relationship was at times strained. He briefly studied with Max Bruch in Berlin. His first appointment was no great shakes, organist at St. Barnabas Church in Lambeth. However this turned out to be greatly influential upon his later output as RVW was commissioned to edit and rewrite the English Hymnal. What is more surprising is that RVW was all his life a firm committed atheist but not only did he write the new hymnal but added four new hymns of his own as well as a number of religious works, not just masses but also what he described as mystic works. Throughout his creative life his works and style would be inseminated with religious forms or folk song or ancient modes in which he clothed much of his output so as to affect a kind of olde Englishe dialect.

It was in writing the English hymnal that he came to study hymns ancient. I do not subscribe to there being hymns modern but RVW was much absorbed with Tudor writing, particularly Thomas Tallis, and again the modes of the times well before the adoption of tonic sol fa. Now don’t get worried. I am not going technical upon you but put in simple terms each mode is the way a scale has its notes separated from each other. We have all learned Do-Re-Mi which is what is called the major scale. There is also the minor scale which is correctly the Aeolian mode. But there have been other modes used in olden times where the distance between notes is positioned differently. To name a few, there are Lydian, Phrygian and pentatonic . There are more modern modes like the Blues mode. There is also a bebop mode which RVW didn’t adopt.. Now it was one thing for RVW to reproduce music written four centuries earlier in some mediaeval mode, like Greensleeves. He would go on to adapt such modes into his own compositions which would create an impression of perceived old England whether it be period sound or clodhopping rustic or again to evoke a particular musical landscape, a sort of Constable in sound. Was it English or phoney Englishness? Now a listener of Mussorgsky’s time would recognize a Russian folk song in Boris Godunov and might even sing it. RVW’s folk songs were simply curiosities but not part of the musical DNA of Joe Public. In the early 1900’s their taste in Tudor music would have been “I’m Henry the Eighth, I am, I am”, sung at the Kings Head or the local Palace of Varieties down the Old Kent Road.

Moving into the first decade of the twentieth century RVW was becoming a musical master chef. A folk tune here coupled with a hymn there, a touch of the Old Hundreth or a modal sprinkle of Thomas Tallis. Blend it all together and you have Vaughan Williams on your platter. One of his earliest works was in 1909 when he was engaged to write incidental music for the annual Greek play at Cambridge, in this case “The Wasps” by Aristophanes. Wasps was the name given to those Athenian citizens who queued up to volunteer to be jurors and give someone a sting. The music is best known for its overture and suite. What immediately strikes home is that though it is an Aristophanic comedy the music is not exactly up the Parthenon, more like like Stow on the Wold. By now RVW had completed a long apprenticeship. Perhaps he thought his music was becoming too narrowly English and that he needed to learn something of what was going on across the Manche. So late in 1907 he decided to go to Paris to take lessons from Ravel who was actually three years his junior. This turned out to be particularly fruitful, with RVW learning “to orchestrate in points of colour rather than in lines”. He returned a few months later to write his very English song cycle “On Wenlock Edge”, to poems by A.E. Housman but Ravel’s brand of impressionism would be found in RVW’s later London Symphony of 1913.

RVW’s researches had led him to an earlier rich vein of Elizabethan music, hitherto unknown, to which he could leapfrog back over the classical and baroque periods and from which he derived his inspiration. In 1906 RVW had included in his English hymnal a psalm by Tallis for Archbishop Parker’s hymnal of 1567. Now in 1910 RVW took up the Elizabethan name of ‘Fantasy’ using the Tallis in its Phrygian mode as the theme. It is not just written for a string orchestra but for a double string orchestra, one larger, the other consisting of nine players set apart from the first, and including also a string quartet. RVW configured it so as to resemble the sound of an organ with the first orchestra the great choir and the second the small choir. The spacing between them emphasises the stereophonic effect in the way that the small orchestra echoes the large. This is a true masterwork, a tapestry of Elizabethan sound with the music moving seamlessly from one section to another. RVW was an early music neo-classical but no-one would have used that term. It was of course later used in the 1920’s by Stravinsky and his followers. They dressed up old masters in new clothes with added lipstick and make up in order to create a novelty in their own image. The Tallis Fantasia is neo-Elizabethan written more in homage to the original. RVW had anticipated his more fashionable successors in reaching across the intervening centuries. The one comparable work which does come to mind is Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro for Strings written in 1905 also with string quartet. The combination is similar but the Elgar has its roots in the 19^th century and, pleasant as it is, it does not have the intensity and spirituality of the Tallis Fantasia.

RVW was well into his thirties by the time he got going. His first main body of works was effectively from 1906 till the Great War. I do not propose to go through each one but it is worth perhaps looking at his life viewed from alongside his cycle of nine symphonies, a fateful number alongside those of Beethoven, Schubert (except he had a missing seventh), Bruckner, Mahler and Dvorak . Writing a symphony was perhaps a natural aim of any young man seeking to emulate the feats of the nineteenth century colossi. As early as 1903 RVW was working on a large scale choral symphony in four movements à la Beethoven, to become the Sea Symphony. It was finished in 1910, lasts 70 minutes and unlike the Beethoven the chorus is at work from the start. He had discovered the poetry of Walt Whitman for his texts and to whom he would later return. It was a great success. The second symphony was called “A London Symphony” or, as RVW put it, a symphony by a Londoner. It has a prelude and a postlude each containing the Big Ben chimes on the harp. Its original version was very long and later given a haircut. It depicts the sounds of Edwardian London, the chirpy cockney, the flower girl in Piccadilly selling violets, a nocturne-scherzo with orchestral imitations of mouth organs and accordions in a Cockney pub followed by a majestic finale, a tad pomp and circumstance. The original score got lost in Berlin after a performance there just before the balloon went up and RVW had to rewrite it from memory after the war ended. The suggestion for the symphony came from his friend and fellow composer, George Butterworth whose own music conjures up much the same rural landscapes as that of RVW. The other well known work from this time, is The Lark Ascending, top of the charts on Classic FM, originally written for violin and piano and orchestrated in 1920,  It is not a concerto but could have made the most wonderful rhapsodic slow movement of a violin concerto. Like the London Symphony it is impressionist in a very English way. For many it symbolizes the lost world of Innocence of the pre-war years except that this is a myth that belies the very turbulent period leading up to the First World War.

On New Year’s Eve 1914 RVW who was living in Chelsea enlisted at Duke of York’s Barracks as a private in an ambulance unit. Enlistment at that time was voluntary and he only was doing what thousands of others were all doing notwithstanding he was 42 and had flat feet. He conducted a military band till 1916 when he was posted to the Western Front. 1916 saw the first battle of the Somme in which his friend George Butterworth died in surrounds which in no way could be likened to the banks of green willow. One feels Butterworth would, had he lived, have been a twin figure of equal stature to RVW. One might imagine RVW driving around in a white ambulance with a red cross. Surprisingly the army may not have mastered military strategy but it knew its Latin and the verb “ambulo-ambulare” which means to walk. RVW’s duties included walking the trenches where he attended the wounded on the spot. In short he was in the front line in appalling conditions. I find a striking similarity between RVW and the artist Stanley Spencer. Both were products of rural England; both influenced by religious subjects and both were members of ambulance units in the war. Spencer managed to depict this in his contemporary painting whilst RVW stored up his ideas but his composition was on hold. He resumed his activities once demobbed including finishing his opera “Hugh The Drover” and resuming his activities with the Leith Hill Festival which he had founded in 1905. In 1922 he wrote his Pastoral Symphony (No 3). For many it was typical rustic VW, a work without climaxes, as flat as a steamy fresh cow pat or as Peter Warlock famously said of it “too much like a cow looking over a gate”. The criticism was of its particular English grey landscape. However it was not an English landscape that RVW had in mind. The Pastoral Symphony was an aspect of the war. He wrote “It’s really wartime music — a great deal of it incubated when I used to go up night after night with the ambulance wagon at Ecoivres and we went up a steep hill and there was a wonderful Corot-like landscape in the sunset – it’s not really lambkins frisking at all as most people take for granted.” So, Corot, not Constable. The initial inspiration came after RVW heard a bugler playing a wrong note which RVW reproduced in the second movement of his symphony..

In 1930 RVW was asked to write a ballet for the newly launched Camargo Society whose musical director was his brilliant former pupil, Constant Lambert. The ballet was straight away different from all others. First of all, RVW did not call it a ballet. He was in his sixteenth century mode and called it a “Masque for Dancing”. There would be no dancing “sur les points”. The subject matter was biblical, “Job”, and it is of symphonic proportions, what might be called a a “Jobsworth”. Something was clearly happening to RVW and the answer exploded forth in 1934 with his fourth symphony. Early in that year Elgar, Holst and Delius had died within three months of each other. There appeared no natural successor although Arnold Bax attempted to claim the crown. At that time RVW was seen as a respectable composer of what Matthew Taylor would describe as the second division, known and respected but much in the same league as say George Dyson or Herbert Howells – for them I’d say 3^rd Divison. And there he would have stayed if his fourth symphony had not appeared. It is notorious for an opening double discord which immediately says that RVW is a modernist after all and not everything comes out of The Woodes So Gaye or stems from the Morris Dance.   This is as violent an opening as you will hear. RVW famously said “I don’t know if I like it but I meant it”. Commentators have attributed all manner of explanations including the depression and the rise of Hitler. This only made RVW even more mad when he commented “It never seems to occur to people that a man might just want to write a piece of music.” Suddenly the sixty year plus old RVW, composer of Greensleeves and Old King Cole, was being projected as England’s Number One symphonist, but not for long. William Walton had laboriously written three movements of his symphony and with its completion the following year a new leader was crowned.

If anything the anger expressed in the fourth symphony was not from Herr Hitler but from the home front. His wife Adeline was getting worse and because of her arthritis confined to a wheel chair. She wanted to leave London where RVW was happily living and move back to Dorking. It has been suggested that his anger stemmed from the strains taking place. RVW’s fourth symphony contrasts remarkably with his cantata “Dona Nobis Pacem” written in 1936. Its title is religious; its content is based on poems written again by Walt Whitman especially the two veteran soldiers from the American Civil War; it is played regularly in concerts of Amnesty International. The first performance of “Five Tudor Portraits” took place also in 1936 at the Norwich Triennial Festival. It also saw the first performance of “Our Hunting Fathers” by the 22 year old Benjamin Britten. The orchestra was particularly mocking in respect of the latter. RVW told them in no uncertain words that they were “in the presence of greatness” and that if they did not want to play Britten’s work they would not play his. Peace and tranquillity were to return in RVW’s beautiful Serenade to Music specially written as a golden jubilee present for the conductor, Sir Henry Wood, in 1938 written for him and sixteen of his favourite singers as soloists.

At about this time a young aspiring actress from the Old Vic who had taken part in a production of Job, Ursula Wood, already married to a gunnery officer, took a shy to RVW and asked to meet him. She was 27; he was 66. According to her he took her to dinner and grabbed hold of her in the back of the taxi and kissed her passionately. There was clearly going to be more of where that came from. She was soon referred to euphemistically as his secretary. Moreover it was an open relationship if not talked about with his wife whom he clearly was not going to leave. In 1944 towards the end of the war Ursula was staying with the VW’s at Dorking when the threat from enemy V1’s (doodle bugs) was at its height. Ursula could not get back to London and stayed the night. It has been described as a ménage à trois although in fact RVW slept in his bed, Adeline slept in hers and Ursula occupied the floor space between. That’s hardly erotic in my book. What is more important about Ursula is that a degree of calm seems to have resulted in RVW’s music. This is particularly so in his fifth symphony which appeared in 1942. He had been writing an opera, “The Pilgrim’s Progress”, after Bunyan, over a period of twenty years and used much of the music intended for that in the symphony. Whilst the fourth was vitriolic the fifth, written in the middle of the war years, was a paragon of peace and tranquillity. It harps back to the Pastoral but one senses a spirituality and calm which, having regard to the bleakness of the time, came as just a shock considering that only a further cluster of high explosives could be expected.

High explosive there was however with the advent of the sixth symphony in 1946 – said by some, but not by RVW, to be his reaction to Hiroshima. For RVW the end of the war did was not about you do the hoky coky and you turn around. Its opening is the same VW who wrote Job and the fourth symphony. The second movement contains an insistent repetitive tattoo of three taps on the side drum, a warning of disaster which eventually gets thundered out by the whole orchestra – a reminder here of Mars from Holst’s Planet Suite. Some, because of the side drum, see a likeness to Nielsen’s fifth symphony; others because of its repetition liken it to Shostakovich’s Leningrad symphony. Just to compare RVW to those two was to suggest he had moved to another planet. The most incredible movement is the last. It is an evocation of space without development or shape. Its co-sanguinity is again Holst, this time Neptune.   RVW admitted to that when interviewed. This symphony contains no finale, just a disappearance into a black hole.

Now RVW was well into his seventies and the grand old man of English music. Following the sixth symphony he wrote the music for the film Scott of the Antarctic which came out in 1948. The film was about heroism, shooting the mules, broken down snow tractors, brave intrepid Englishmen man-hauling their equipment and never countenancing the use of dogs – so unEnglish – and of course the most valiant of persons after Scott himself, John Mills. I loved it and RVW wrote the music. Moreover the music was too good not to be re-used, much like Prokofiev with his opera the Prodigal Son. The ideas were recycled to make his Symphony No 7, the Sinfonia Antarctica with full orchestra, a wordless soprano and a wind machine. But I have always encountered one difficulty. When I hear the music my inner eye sees the cold wastes of the Beardmore Glacier. Yet, when I see the film which appears almost as regularly on TV as Midsummer Murders my attention gets diverted from the events on the screen on hearing the somewhat faded sounds of Vaughan-Williams Sinfornia Antarctica in the background.

In 1951 Adeline Vaughan Williams died. Ursula Wood and RVW’s relationship had continued. Her husband had died of a heart attack in 1942. RVW had remained married, if not conventionally loyal, to Adelina who was fully aware of what was going on. He was now over eighty. RVW and Ursula married in February 1953 to the shock of the press.. One presumes there was no more hanky panky in the back of taxi cabs. (Ladies and gentlemen, we have a young French lady who has joined our class and for her I suggest for hanky panky – galipettes).

Of concertos RVW wrote few but was prepared to try anything once. For Harriet Cohen he wrote a piano concerto in return for 10,000 kisses. In the fifties he wrote a tuba concerto for Philip Catalinet, lead tuba player of the Philharmonia and a harmonica concerto for that greatest of mouth organ players, Larry Adler who had taken up asylum in Britain to escape the McCarthy UnAmerican Activities Committee. Larry Adler might have described a spade as a spade but he would never describe a harmonica as anything but a mouth organ.

Well now the journey seemed over but RVW wanted to go on. And on. His concise eighth symphony with a cornet and vibraphone was written in the USA and dedicated to Glorious John (Barbirolli). It was followed by the ninth first performed in April 1958 under Sargent. At 86 he had produced a symphony which generated enormous power and included in its orchestration three saxophones (two tenor and one alto) and the strange wide bore flugelhorn. Its battery includes timpani, side drums, bass drum cymbals, triangle, gong, tam-tam, bells, glockenspiel, xylophone and celesta. Thomas Tallis would not have just turned but would have risen from his grave. RVW’s original intention was going to be a programme symphony based on Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Though he dropped the idea his sketches indicated movements relating to people and events in the novel with the first movement headed “Wessex Prelude”. Being wise after the event the last movement could well describe the bleak landscape of Egdon Heath. As with his good friend, Gustav Holst before him, he had kept the faith in reproducing Hardy’s rural England. But no-one could any longer refer to the Country Bumpkin School of Composers. If RVW’s physical powers were failing him his inner ear remained as sharp and powerful as it had ever been. There remained something of his old self but mystifying at the same time.

On 5^th August 1958 the ninth symphony was due to be recorded under Boult, the day when Ralph Vaughan Williams died. That evening I was at a Promenade Concert with the Halle under Barbirolli. The programme was changed and Johann Strauss or whatever was replaced by the Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis. Glorious John wept as he conducted.