Spring Symphonies, No 65 - Vaughan Williams: Symphony No 6

Now here’s a thing, this is my first symphony.  When as a teenager I had been thrilled by Holst’s Planets Suite, I looked round for the next thing to listen to and next to the Holst LP in the budget “Classics for Pleasure” section there was another work by an Englishman which looked interesting from the sleeve write up.  CfP LPs were cheap introductions to much great music - they were mostly re-issues but some were new recordings. So I took it home.  It was all a bit new to me.  I was aware of the bits of Beethoven and Mozart symphonies I’d heard on compilation LPs in the home collection and I was also aware that these were old music.  I hadn't really found a sense of what a symphony is just from these random tracks: bleeding chunks don’t provide the full story, the contrast or the sense of a journey.  Now I’ve come to know what a symphony can be and I think that is a broader realisation because this work was my first step and not the classics of Beethoven, Brahms and Mozart.

So once home I put the record on and was hit squarely in the temple by this work's phenomenal opening, the rest was arresting and perplexing but as I worked it through ove rteh next few years I also came to understand the Sixth as Vaughan Williams most powerful and far sighted works.  Its worth a brief description because I can't think of much like it in teh catalogue - perhaps Sibelius' Tapiola or Hindmeith's Mathis Der Maler.

Raplh Vaughan William's (RVW henceforth) Sixth symphony, of nine, opens with terse, tight brass-led chords in two conflicting keys which have a profound imprint for teh rest of the work.  From them a raging torrent of strings spin us up and down and the pace and incisive pattern of the work is set. We return to the motto and then before you can blink into into an angular, interrupted theme which has some of the aspects of 1940s dance band music about it.  This hints at music of it’s time and it’s a bit of a shock.  The torrent subsides into a jaunty swinging episode led by trumpets but with much more going below these fazmiliar strophes including side drum edging between band and march.  The music becomes more subdued again with a strings leading then the RVW builds up to an interrupted march on familiar themes and then back to the swirling strings, more agitated than before.  The whole effects like being spun on a chair between various radios playing different styles of 1940s music.  And next in this kalidoscope, the most delectable music - stolen from his film music for an idyllic wartime film, Flemish Farm.  Here we have a more typical Vaughan Williams, at his most noble and pastoral, and yet no soon has the warm sun flooded in than the opening motto of horror and turmoil shuts the door in its face.

The next movement has menace and mystery conjured from a slippery amalgam of disjointed melody, pedal notes and insistent rhythms.  The music idles around until gripped by some circular force into formal dance which is awkward and insistent. This breaks to a fanfare high brass and the recurrent air of militarism is confirmed - all very familiar to his audience in 1948.  Some of the scoring here is superbly haunting and then by turns frightening and desolate.  The central string section expands with each repetition both in reach and feeling. At the low point an insistent drum beat appears off centre and destructive also monotone.  There builds a ferocious climax of elemental power - make of it what you will.  It seems to me to be full of anger.  As it breaks a wistful cor angles solo confirms a sadness that this assault has provoked (but not i the background the drum still reminds is that somewhere this torment still rages.

I’ll break from my progress through the work to note this was one of the most successful English symphonies of its century.  Only Elgar’s First symphony was more successful, but RVW’s Sixth was rapidly picked up by orchestras and conductors across the world with over 100 performances in it’s first year. Boult, Barbirolli and Sargent were great champions of Vaughan Williams in his day and close to the composer.  Stokowski (who has been at Oxford with RVW) beat Boult to the first recordced eprfomance but Boult recorded soon after and that included both versions of teh scherzo on it's release.  Then Americain audiences were treated to it early with Stokowski, Koussevitsky and Mitropolous all picking it up.  It has now an international following and is still played regularly. It’s singular popularity has perhaps not endured in teh UK - it is third in the list of appearences of Vaughan Williams symphonies at the Proms (after Nos 2 and 5) with 20 performances.  Nowadays the other symphonies in the canon have caught up internationally, especially give the current wave of interest from conductors like Wilson, Manze and Brabbins. For waht it's worth Handley brings it home (in two recordings) better than most.

The third movement - a kind of Scherzo - but bigger and bolder than that word suggests.  The swarming ideas burst upon us: each colourfully orchestrated with everything from xylophone to four saxophones employed.  At first hearing this is slightly overwhelming as it brings out the tremendous concentration of melodic material.  The tone is all very hard to pin down - by now we are used to the discords, the clashing tonality and fragmentary melodies built on often repeated mottos but the structure is tight and intricate.  What it must have been to hear this in April 1948 whilst the war still hung heavy as a great physical and emotional scar on the nation’s psyche?  The writhing trio scarcely has any shape at all but ascends to a militaristic climax and then plunges back into the turmoil but as the music scatters all around it forms into more coherent shapes - very reminiscent of Shostakovich at times.  The whole movement is aggressive, claustrophobic and quite the opposite of what many would have expected from the composer of the Tallis Fantasia or Lark Ascending.

Indeed there must have been a great deal to surprise the audience who has assumed that the 70 year old composer had reached the apogee of his skills in the deeply moving and deeply personal wartime Fifth Symphony.  A work which is extremely powerful in my view but for completely different reasons.  The idea that the language of the Sixth symphony came as a complete surprise to audiences is rather odd though - there’s plenty in his works to indicate he was capable of this type of assertive, concentrated and deeply flavoured writing.  We are warned not to place too much store by putting the war and it’s effects front and centre.  As we learn more about Vaughan Williams complex domestic position during the war and afterwards, one can sense a personal anger here.  Couple the declining health of his wife and burgeoning relationship with the woman who would become his second wife and that might be part of the picture).  The symphony is riddled with strife and the fight against it and in a continuous flow of colour we get the sheer chaos of the situation amplified and cut to it’s most essential elements - just suggestions but none of that prepares us for the composer’s conclusions.  As the scherzo winds us down to a series of wood wind reminiscences, the strings pick up.

That said there is a great deal of nothing about the the last movement.  This Epilogue is ten minutes of music all at the same quiet dynamic - a startling innovation and very difficult to perform well.  It has an overlapping quality in terms of its melodic material and an undulating shape. There is colour but it is all muted.  It shivers and shifts uneasily.  There’s something of the nightmare about it not least because the music itself is so hauntingly empty.  Vaughan Williams was pressed on it’s meaning and eventually quoted “we are such stuff as dreams are made on…” from The Tempest.  Others have found nihilism or echoes of the landscape of nuclear war as a contemporary reference.  It fades to nothing.

Nothing about this symphony is resolved properly for me - but I love it’s energy and it’s deeply satisfying uncertainty comes better to represent real life than other ideas in music.  Like Sibelius 4 the desolation relfects a very common aspect of the human condition.  Vaughan Williams was thought to have finished his symphonic journey in 1943.  I think in many ways he’d only just started to play with his mature style in the five last symphonies.  It is a personal work for me because it showed me first off the scope or lack of it for a great intellect working on the idea of “a symphony” was way beyond form or content or language or the assumption of authorial intent.  This symphony just “is” and I’m profoundly grateful that it was my gateway to symphonies of many kinds. 

What this work also taught me was that a symphony takes us to a place: its whole greater than the journey or it's component parts.  In doing so is both musically, intellectually and emotionally a different experience to a tone poem, and overture, an opera or a sonata.  This journey is full of  dizzying contrast and mysterious allusions.  It works at some deep level in the brain I suspect.

It gives me a clue about the more general nature of the "symphony" as an idea. We know music appeals to the oldest part of the brain but the arrangements and patterns of a symphony works on the new part of the brain too.  In some no doubt overly simplistic way, the two parts of the brain being stimulated - without a literal input (no description or words) - is a profoundly satisfying thing for some of us. I dare say most of us, most of the time, hear music which appeals to the old brain and doesn’t test the new brain.  These symphonies - densely wrought, fiercely written and profoundly deep in content, push us to bring new and iold brain together.  This is uncomfortable as we sort old brain and new brain elements whilst it happens the first hearing, easier as we hear more on repeat hearings.  But worth it in the long term both as an intellectual exercise (and that’s where it ends for some) but as an emotional exercise.  Be it Beethoven’s Fifth or Vaughan Williams Sixth - as Vaughan Williams' biographer Hugh Ottaway oft quoted “experience is all”.


Here's Andrew Manze at the Proms in 2012 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1suBbnp5Go