Ralph Vaughan Williams Was Complicated, but Not Conservative

Ralph Vaughan Williams understood what his fate was likely to be.

“Every composer cannot expect to have a worldwide message, but he may reasonably expect to have a special message for his own people,” Vaughan Williams, an Englishman, said in a series of lectures on folk music and nationalism at Bryn Mawr College in 1932. “Many young composers,” he went on, “make the mistake of imagining they can be universal without at first having been local.”

There was a time when it seemed plausible that Vaughan Williams might become, if not exactly a universal composer, then at least something more than the countrymen he had described as “unappreciated at home and unknown abroad” in the 1912 essay “Who Wants the English Composer?”

Several of Vaughan Williams’s nine symphonies were staples in the United States in his lifetime, and from the depths of the Blitz around 1940 to the front-page news of his death in 1958, he was among the 20th-century composers that American orchestras played most. The New York Times critic Olin Downes even placed him near the summit of contemporary composition in 1954, though he feared that his “kinship to modern society” meant that “the music of the Englishman will age sooner than that of Sibelius with the passing of the period that bore it.”

So it seemed. When Harold Schonberg, Downes’s successor, argued in The Times in 1964 that “Vaughan Williams may turn out to be the most important symphonist of the century,” he did so while complaining that his scores were no longer performed, and alongside a report about how busy Benjamin Britten had become.

If Vaughan Williams’s music has since recovered in Britain after a period when it was the butt of modernist jokes — “The Lark Ascending” and “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis” are routinely elected the favorite works of radio listeners there — the same has hardly been true elsewhere, even in this, the 150th anniversary of his birth.

Perhaps Aaron Copland’s judgment in 1931, that Vaughan Williams was “the kind of local composer who stands for something great in the musical development of his own country but whose actual musical contribution cannot bear exportation,” was in the end right.

IT IS AT THIS POINT in an essay on an arguably overlooked composer that a critic will often suggest that the judgment of history is wrong, explaining that new research shows that the subject, if renowned as a conservative, was in fact a progressive, deserving of a fresh assessment.

It’s an easy enough argument to make in Vaughan Williams’s case, and he does repay another listen. An excellent new biography by the musicologist Eric Saylor makes clear that the composer — who was born in Gloucestershire on Oct. 12, 1872, wrote his first piece at 6, the year of the Brahms Violin Concerto, and his last at 85, in that of Stockhausen’s “Gruppen” — was not, or at least not entirely, the parochial reactionary that he has sometime appeared to be, the comforting nostalgist and purveyor of rustic folksiness who dressed like a gentleman farmer, as Copland called him, and composed like one, too.

Especially in the 1920s and ’30s, Vaughan Williams was amply capable of wielding ferocious, dissonant violence, most sardonically in his Fourth Symphony; Bartok admired his percussive Piano Concerto. His modal vocabulary, flecked with pentatonic and other outré accents, could be profoundly ambiguous — sometimes stark, as in “Job,” a ballet in all but name, and sometimes discomforting, as in the otherworldly Sixth. Even the “Lark,” for all its pastoral popularity, has an indeterminate form and a sense of “sonic freedom,” Saylor writes.

Nor did Vaughan Williams, a student socialist who remained left-leaning, always flee the present into an Arcadian past, despite the wistfulness of works like his Oboe Concerto. He confronted a broken world in “A Pastoral Symphony,” which despite its title reflects on World War I, in which he witnessed death as a medical orderly and artilleryman, and in “Dona Nobis Pacem,” a pleading antiwar testament from 1936 that anticipates Britten’s “War Requiem.”

In truth, though, it is hard to tell any sort of simple story about Vaughan Williams. He cared not at all for trends, making sure he knew what was going on elsewhere in contemporary music — he did, after all, study with Ravel — but remaining indifferent to much of it. “Schoenberg meant nothing to me,” he wrote after the serialist’s death in 1951, “but as he apparently meant a lot to a lot of other people I dare say it is all my fault.” Michael Kennedy, a biographer and friend, recalled that he liked to pronounce “tone row,” impishly, as if it rhymed with “cow.”

“Why should music be ‘original’?” Vaughan Williams grumbled in 1950. “The object of art is to stretch out to the ultimate realities through the medium of beauty. The duty of the composer is to find the mot juste. It does not matter if this word has been said a thousand times before as long as it is the right thing to say at that moment.”

He was therefore a pragmatist, with an independent streak as strong as his patriotism. He was not beholden to English music as he found it — neither Elgar’s imperial grandeur nor the examples of his tutors, Parry and Stanford — but sought through folk songs and hymnals to refine a national style that he could preserve, and through which he could prosper. Oxymorons work better for him than simplistic categories; he was a conservative iconoclast, an unconventional traditionalist.

“There is a unity of style, it’s just that he was able to stretch it in so many different directions,” the conductor Andrew Davis, who is president of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society, said in an interview. “Elgar’s style was quite consistent, and Britten changed over the years, but there was not the radical breadth of emotional range that you find in Vaughan Williams.”

On account of that breadth of emotional and compositional range, there are any number of entry points into Vaughan Williams’s work; for me, the moment of discovery came hearing the Fifth Symphony.

ON ITS FACE, the Fifth is one of Vaughan Williams’s most straightforward works, and more than debatably his most purely beautiful. Dedicated to Sibelius, it premiered at the Royal Albert Hall, with the composer conducting on June 24, 1943, and it was immediately hailed for its lustrous consolation amid total war. After a New York Philharmonic performance the following year, Downes called it “the symphony of a poet, regardless of the throng, who communes with the ideal.”

That poetry, especially the yearning of its Romanza, was hard-earned. Vaughan Williams started the symphony after he met Ursula Wood in 1938, his eventual second wife, who offered him musical as well as personal rejuvenation. He found inspiration piecing together scraps from other works, including from an opera he feared he would not finish, “The Pilgrim’s Progress” and short contributions to a pageant that he had directed, “England’s Pleasant Land.” They were called “Exit for the Ghosts of the Past” and “A Funeral March for the Old Order.”

The result is not the exercise in dishonest nostalgia that some critics have heard. The scholar Julian Horton has argued that, from its uneasy opening harmonies to its concluding passacaglia, seraphic at the last, its rarefied blend of archaic modes and modern tonalities created “a new musical order,” a way out of a musical and civilization collapse.

Put another way, the Fifth, which the Chicago Symphony Orchestra will play next month, is a symphony about hope. And whether Vaughan Williams intended it or not, it was initially heard by some as a political work, though not necessarily in the way one might expect from an avowed English nationalist.

Far too old to fight in World War II, Vaughan Williams still made himself useful, writing scores for propaganda films, aiding European refugees, even collecting scrap metal to do what he could for the war effort. No composer, he told Michael Tippett in 1941, could “sit apart from the world & create music until he is sure he has done all he can to preserve the world from destruction.”

But the Fifth struck some listeners as a different sort of contribution to the conflict. From Vaughan Williams’s nationalism, intriguingly, flowed a genuine internationalism; around the start of the war, he founded a branch of Federal Union, an activist group that, among other political arrangements, sought a United States of Europe. For his friend and fellow traveler Adrian Boult, the Fifth’s “serene loveliness” indeed showed, “as only music can, what we must work for when this madness is over.”

If the Fifth offers an idealist corollary to the defiance of Shostakovich’s “Leningrad” Symphony, its finest interpreters make that idealism sound plausible. Boult’s readings have too stiff an upper lip for me, though their authority is unmistakable; others, from Serge Koussevitzky’s muscular account to the soaring grandeur of John Barbirolli’s, the radiant patience of André Previn’s to the touching honesty of the composer’s own, give more of a sense of the stakes involved.

But the 20th century was harsh on “loveliness” like this. Who could believe in such an uncomplicated optimism now? Vaughan Williams’s grim Sixth, which was such a sensation after its debut in 1948 that the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra all played it at Carnegie Hall in 1949, stands as the answer, with its desolate epilogue. Vaughan Williams half-joked that he called it “The Big Three,” a reference to the great-power leaders who crushed dreams of a new world order after the war; critics, to his annoyance, heard it as portraying a nuclear apocalypse.

Yet there the Fifth remains, an expression in sound of what once was thought possible. “To imagine beauty under such conditions,” Saylor suggests of its writing, “and to express that beauty so that others too might find hope within the wreckage — that is the mark of the true artist.” Perhaps, dare I say it, a universal one.