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<\/a>RVW c. 1952<\/p><\/div>\n
In 1952, when Vaughan Williams was asked to pick one of his symphonies for a special concert celebrating his 80th <\/span>birthday, he chose the Fifth Symphony. That this work would hold a special place in its creator\u2019s heart should not surprise us. No other work of his had such a long and complex gestation with such profound connections to his earlier works, nor is there any work which so perfectly captures his most personal and distinctive of musical languages. I vividly remember our former composer-in-association John McCabe telling me that he held RVW to be \u201cthe greatest 20th <\/span>Century symphonist, bar none.\u201d At first, I was stunned by John\u2019s suggestion \u2013 what about Mahler, Shostakovich, Nielsen and even our own Edward Elgar? But if one is looking to make John\u2019s case for RVW\u2019s symphonic supremacy, the Fifth Symphony is surely the place to start.<\/p>\n Vaughan Williams began sketching the Fifth Symphony in 1936, and by 1938 was fully engrossed in the score. Progress on the Fifth was slowed by numerous external factors. Vaughan Williams, who had served as a medical orderly in World War I soon became involved in the efforts of the new World War, and also had to meet deadlines for several film scores and shorter pieces, including the Serenade to Music and Five Variants of \u2018Dives and Lazarus. He finally completed the symphony in early 1943 and revised it in 1952. The work is dedicated \u201cWithout permission and with the sincerest of flattery to Jean Sibelius, whose great example is worthy of imitation.\u201d It was premiered under the composer\u2019s baton by the London Philharmonic at the 1943 Proms.<\/p>\n Although the Fifth Symphony was begun in 1936, the work has significant thematic connections with his opera, or \u2018morality\u2019 as he often called it, Pilgrim\u2019s Progress, which he worked on from 1909-1952. The dedication to Sibelius serves as a worthy signal of the work\u2019s seriousness of purpose. Musicologist Michael\u00a0 Steinberg writes that for Vaughan Williams, as for Sibelius, \u201cthe symphony was the form in which a composer might express his deepest, most complex, most personal feelings and realise his richest and most evolved compositional plans.\u201d<\/p>\n The work is outwardly abstract, but the many references to Pilgrim\u2019s Progress, other works from his catalogue and his biographical circumstances paint a picture of a multi-layered work from a composer who was both uplifted by newly found love and in despair at the return of war.<\/p>\n An early version of the first movement of the symphony was called Funeral March for the Old Order, but the mood is perhaps more gently melancholy than militaristic. It\u2019s certainly about as far as you can get from the many funeral marches which populate the symphonies of Gustav Mahler (whose music he loathed). Like much of his music, Vaughan Williams finds emotional texture in the ambiguities of modal harmony. The symphony opens with a gently rocking horn fanfare in D major, but the horns\u2019 bittersweet but hopeful melody is somewhat undermined by C natural in the low strings which underpins the opening. That C turns the music in a dark direction, moving it through C minor before there bursts forth an aspiring violin melody in E major. This is a quote from the \u201cAlleluia\u201d Vaughan Williams\u00a0 wrote in 1906 for The English Hymnal, a fragment he had already quoted in several other works.<\/p>\n The Scherzo is both shadowy and virtuosic, dark and wickedly playful. Vaughan Williams called his early sketch of it Exit of the Ghosts of the Past, and ghostly it is. It is followed by what must be one of the most touching symphonic slow movements of the last 100 years, the Romanza. Some commentators have read the title of the movement as a reference to his new-found love and future wife, Ursula, but it is also in this movement that the connections to\u00a0Pilgrim\u2019s Progress are most telling. He wrote a passage taken from Bunyan\u2019s novel into his manuscript at the top of the Romanza: \u201cUpon this place stood a cross, and a little below a sepulcher. Then he said: \u2018He hath given me rest by his sorrow, and life by his death.\u2019\u201d In the opera, those words are given to the same poignant melody the english horn plays to launch this movement. Later, there is an anguished passage in a faster tempo which, in RVW\u2019s Pilgrim\u2019s Progress, is associated with the Pilgrim\u2019s words \u201cSave me, Lord, my burden is greater than I can bear.\u201d<\/p>\n The Finale is a passacaglia worthy of consideration in the same breath as that other great symphonic passacaglia which ends Brahms Fourth Symphony. Where Brahms\u2019 uses the passacaglia\u2019s repeating structure to create a sense of driving headlong into unavoidable catastrophe, Vaughan Williams turns the passacaglia into something like a\u00a0rite of purification. Gradually, he strips away the modal colourations which have given the symphony so much of its character, moving toward pure, almost Bach-ian D Major. The horn calls which opened the symphony now return in\u00a0blazing fortissimo and one more \u201cAllelulia\u201d sounds from the hymn All Creatures of Our God and King. Michael Steinberg describes the ending better than I can: \u201cIn peaceful meditation\u2026 the music arrives at its destination: a luminous D\u00a0major close, hushed, beatific, with an ineffable sense of peace. Here, if anywhere in music, is transcendence.\u201d<\/p>\n