Ralph Vaughan Williams

Ralph Vaughan Williams
Toward the Unknown Region 12’
Symphony No. 4 in F minor 31’

INTERVAL: 20 minutes

Ralph Vaughan Williams
Job: A Masque for Dancing 45’

Hallé Choir
Sir Andrew Davis conductor
BBC Philharmonic

Tonight’s concert is being recorded for broadcast on Tuesday 29 March at 7.30pm on BBC Radio 3. It will be available to stream or download for 30 days after broadcast via BBC Sounds, where you can also find podcasts and music mixes.

Help us improve our online programmes
Please take this five-minute survey and let us know what you think of these notes.
Programme survey

Hallé Choir

Throughout his long adult life, Vaughan Williams was repeatedly drawn to religious or mystical writings; yet his attitude to religious belief was ambiguous – or, one could say, refreshingly honest. He knew that, on some mysterious level, there were deep truths in great mystical texts, although belief in an omnipotent loving God made little sense to him. As a young man he found a reflection of his mixed feelings in the writings of the American poet Walt Whitman. Whitman’s hatred of hypocrisy and blind tradition, his impassioned conviction of the brotherhood of man and above all his nature-filled mysticism appealed strongly to Vaughan Williams. At the same time Whitman’s radically free verse, its ‘vista, music, half-tints, and even less than half-tints’, would prove another liberating influence, leading away from the Germanic models dominant in England at that time.

So it’s highly appropriate that Vaughan Williams’s first significant large-scale work, Toward the Unknown Region, should be a Whitman setting. It begins with a challenge: ‘Darest thou now, O soul, walk out with me toward the unknown region …?’ The dark tone and sombre funereal tread suggest that the ‘unknown region’ of the title is death. But Whitman seems to have something else in mind: the possibility of spiritual death and rebirth in this life. Could that, rather than some conventional comforting notion of the soul’s immortality, be the message behind Vaughan Williams’s joyously affirmative conclusion? If so, that message is still more explicit in Vaughan Williams’s next Whitman setting, A Sea Symphony (Symphony No. 1, 1903–9), and in many works to come. As the composer’s biographer Michael Kennedy observed, ‘toward the unknown region’ could stand as a motto for Vaughan Williams’s entire life’s work.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

Unlike Elgar before him, Vaughan Williams received a traditional musical education at the Royal College of Music in London, but he also studied abroad – in Berlin with Bruch and in Paris with Ravel. Soon after his return came the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910) and A Sea Symphony (1903–9). He was active as a collector of folk music and edited The English Hymnal (1906). After completing his second symphony, A London Symphony (1911–13), he joined the army. As well as choral works such as Sancta civitas (1923–5) and Serenade to Music (1938), he wrote a Mass and made many choral arrangements of English folk songs. Apart from The Lark Ascending (1914) for violin and orchestra, his concerto-type works – for viola (Flos campi), piano, oboe and tuba – remain rarely performed. After the death of his first wife he remarried aged 80, and he produced two more symphonies before his death.

^{Profile by Edward Bhesania © BBC}

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

‘I don’t know whether I like it, but it’s what I meant’ was Vaughan Williams’s verdict during rehearsals for the first performance of his Fourth Symphony in 1935. Since then there has been a lot of speculation and argument about what he ‘meant’. The dissonance and abrasive orchestration, the sense of elemental rage and desolation took many by surprise. Why, wrote one friend, was there ‘no beauty’ in the work? Vaughan Williams’s reply contrasts intriguingly with the remark quoted above:

‘When you say you do not think my F mi[nor] symph. beautiful my answer must be that I do think it beautiful – not that I did not mean it to be beautiful because it reflects unbeautiful times – because we know that beauty can come from unbeautiful things … 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 …’

Even so, Vaughan Williams hinted that the idea for the symphony came to him after reading a review in The Times of the 1931 Festival of the International Society of Contemporary Music. The reviewer wrote that the composers ‘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 …’

The Fourth Symphony opens with a ‘battering’ dissonant onslaught from the full orchestra. Most of the symphony’s leading themes derive from ideas flung out here. The second theme (massed strings) is more lyrical, if still troubled, but at length this morphs into a fast, strutting march tune, still predominantly loud and forceful. Then a long, ominous crescendo leads to a compact but violently intense return of the first two themes. This builds to one last cathartic climax, then the ghost of the march tune returns on icy muted strings, leading to a weirdly calm ending.

Next, chordal figures on muted brass and woodwind set in motion a walking bass line (the ‘basso ostinato’ cited in the Times review) on pizzicato cellos and basses with strings entering in imitation, their harmonies clashing uneasily. Much of this Andante moderato is restless, nervously searching. Even the ending (low flute and hushed muted trombones) is strangely unresolved.

The Scherzo is all demonic humour, violent one moment, playfully subversive the next, with a galumphing Trio section led off by tuba and bassoons. At length a long crescendo transition (shades of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony) sweeps straight into the Finale. But, if there is triumphalism here, it is crude, strutting, ominous – let’s not forget that some very ‘unbeautiful’ things were happening in Beethoven’s homeland in the early 1930s. Midway through, there is a reminder of the eerie stillness that ended the first movement; but the finale erupts again, precipitating the ‘Epilogo fugato’, at once rigidly formal and mercilessly violent, culminating in a ferociously condensed return of the symphony’s opening. Then, with a brutal fff thud, the symphony is over.

INTERVAL: 20 minutes

Scene I        Introduction. Pastoral Dance. Satan’s appeal to God. Saraband of the Sons of God
Scene II      Satan’s Dance
Scene III    Minuet of the sons and daughters of Job
Scene IV    Job’s Dream. Dance of plague, pestilence, famine and battle
Scene V      Dance of the Messengers
Scene VI    Dance of Job’s comforters. Job’s curse. A vision of Satan
Scene VII Elihu’s dance of youth and beauty. Pavane of the Sons of the Morning
Scene VIII Galliard of the Sons of the Morning. Altar dance and heavenly pavane
Scene IX Epilogue

The biblical book of Job has fascinated some commentators, horrified others. Satan challenges God to put his servant Job to a series of terrible tests. Will Job keep the faith? At first he does so heroically, but then comes a terrifying moment when Job, strained to breaking point, curses the day he was born. Eventually God appears to him in a whirlwind and lectures him about the greatness of his own achievements and, humbled, Job is restored to health and happiness. For the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, this was a beautiful demonstration of the need to trust not our own flawed reason but God’s higher wisdom; to the psychologist Carl Jung, it looked a lot like bullying.

Vaughan Williams’s attitude to religion was complex and nuanced. He knew there was something important in it but that it couldn’t be what it literally claimed to be. So when, in 1928, he was approached to write music for a ballet based on William Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job, he responded enthusiastically. Blake’s mysticism, reflected in his poetry and engravings, appealed to Vaughan Williams throughout his adult life, but so too did Blake’s refreshingly original, unorthodox take on religion. For Blake, the God of the Old Testament was a highly questionable figure, and his illustrations movingly reflect the troubling but endlessly absorbing elements of the biblical story. As a ballet, Vaughan Williams’s Job was judged a failure at its premiere in 1931, but as music it was instantly welcomed as one of his richest and most profound achievements. Its grand symphonic sweep is compelling and the themes are wonderfully characterful, but there’s also a refined sense of orchestral colour and atmosphere that Vaughan Williams rarely matched elsewhere: Blake’s haunting visual imagery has been translated lovingly into music.

The Introduction reveals Job in contemplation to the veiled tones of low strings, harp and low flutes, leading to archaic-sounding reedy pastoral sounds. Satan’s entry is unmissable: sinister, angular dissonant figures on low woodwind and pizzicato cellos and basses. God’s response is grandly impassive (‘All that [Job] hath is in thy power’), then the Sons of the Morning (angels) dance a saraband in God’s honour. In Satan’s Dance, the diabolical adversary seizes God’s now empty throne and dances in obscene triumph. The destruction of Job’s wealth and family are depicted grimly in the Minuet of the sons and daughters of Job. Job’s Dream begins in moving, hushed dignity but the dream itself is a nightmare; messengers bring news of death and destruction, yet the dignified hushed music endures as Job continues to bless God. But his patience is finally destroyed by the three false ‘comforters’, their tones caught to perfection by an unctuous alto saxophone. In despair Job curses God; then the heavens open and Job sees Satan seated on God’s throne (full orchestra and organ). The healing process is initiated by the young, beautiful Elihu (solo violin), then the stately Pavane of the Sons of the Morning heralds God’s return and the end of Satan’s reign. Satan is banished and a robust galliard depicts the rebuilding of Job’s fortunes. (Strikingly, God’s sermon from the whirlwind is omitted.) The music from the Introduction returns, showing Job humbled and serene, and leads to a touching final benediction.

^{Pogramme notes © Stephen Johnson
Stephen Johnson is the author of books on Bruckner, Wagner, Mahler and Shostakovich and a regular contributor to BBC Music Magazine. For 14 years he was a presenter of BBC Radio 3’s Discovering Music. He now works both as a freelance writer and as a composer.}

Biographies

Sir Andrew Davis conductor

Sir Andrew Davis was Organ Scholar at King’s College, Cambridge, before taking up conducting. During his 50-year career he has held positions with Chicago Lyric Opera (Music Director and Principal Conductor, 2000–21), the BBC Symphony Orchestra (Chief Conductor, 1991–2004, and now Conductor Laureate), Glyndebourne Festival Opera (Music Director, 1988–2000), Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (Chief Conductor, 2013–19, and now Conductor Laureate) and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (Principal Conductor, 1975–88, and now Conductor Laureate). Additionally, he is Conductor Emeritus with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and President of the BBC Symphony Chorus.

He has led performances at many of the world’s leading opera houses, among them the Metropolitan Opera, New York, La Scala, Milan, the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, Bayreuth Festival and the major companies of Munich, Paris, San Francisco and Santa Fe. He has appeared with virtually every other internationally prominent orchestra, including the Berlin and Rotterdam Philharmonic orchestras, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and all the major British orchestras.

This season sees his return to the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and to Chicago Lyric Opera, where he conducts Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Other engagements include concerts with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, LA Colburn School of Music, Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra and Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.

Recent recording highlights include Massenet’s Thaïs with the Toronto SO, the third volume in his project to record the complete orchestral works of Eugene Goossens with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, and orchestral works by Berlioz, Bliss and Elgar. His series of recordings with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus celebrating British composers was recently reissued as a 16‑CD retrospective collection.

Sir Andrew Davis was appointed CBE in 1992 and knighted in the 1999 New Year Honours List. He has also received an honorary doctorate from Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois..