Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Fourth Symphony
Mention ‘Vaughan Williams’ and, for many, the images conjured up are of frolicking lambkins, twee vicarages, Morris dancers – and, yes, larks ascending over sunlit hills and fields. He is the quintessential English rural composer, creator of innocuous, harmless worlds of peaceful pleasure and benign self-satisfaction. To the proprietors of these lazy stereotypes, fed on a diet of Classic FM and adverts for minibreaks in the Cotswolds, hearing for the first time the opening bars of his Fourth Symphony (1935) would act like a bucket of ice-cold water to the face or an electric cable to the genitals.
Examples of Ralph Vaughan Williams – RVW to his adherents – as the quaint and cutesy purveyor of sentimental non-threatening idylls do exist in his output, so it is not an entirely idle categorization, for he was strongly influenced by both Tudor music and English folk song (though they too, of course, are every bit as intricate and intriguing as any other music when scrutinized in the right way). His public image was hardly helped, either, by his gruff no-nonsense manner and the general appearance that here was a man who had practically left the womb in tweeds. But it is scarcely the whole story.
RVW’s nine symphonies, in particular, are a rich, complex and immensely varied group of challenging musical works. Although this listener has a few, occasional, quibbles about the first of them, they are nine masterpieces, making up one of the great symphonic cycles of the twentieth century, and the peer of those marvels from Mahler, Sibelius and Shostakovich. Each of the set explores its own unique world in a unique way: from the vocal-orchestral maritime extravaganza of the Sea Symphony (No.1) to the urban life and strife of the London Symphony (No.2), the exquisite post-war ruminations of the Pastoral Symphony (No.3), the bucolic interrogations of No.5, the cataract, jazz and skirmish of No.6, the filmic tone painting and emotional maelstrom of the Sinfonia antarctica (No.7), the malarkey and meditations of No.8, and finally the Thomas Hardy–influenced agony and tenacity of the Ninth.
But of all the nine, it is probably the Fourth that most diverges from the fuddy-duddy pigeonhole, for it is an absolute belter of a symphony. It explodes in its opening moments and scarcely relents, save for some passages of exhaustion and gloom, for thirty-five minutes of angst, anguish, screams of pain, twisted metal and gyrating appliances. It is an inexorably contemporary work of discord and despair, aggravation and antagonism, sucking the listener in and then spitting them out, disgusted or indifferent. It is as if the baa lambs have been bayonetted, the vicar’s tea party strafed – it’s less lark ascending than hawk with a hangover.
There are echoes of Bartók, Prokofiev and Hindemith – visions of Edward Elgar stripped, shoved into overalls and told to operate machinery – but it is all Vaughan Williams’s own inimitable musical world. Whatever unwarranted reputation he has as a tame romantic or meditative rustic is shattered by the vehemence and modernity of this visionary symphony. Moreover, unlike his first three essays in the medium, this symphony does not have a designated title and thus stands as a haughty, nameless, endlessly evasive beast clad in anonymous iron. Irascible, ferocious, its harmonic language supercharged by his experience of writing the violent Satan music for Job (1930) and the weather-beaten intensity of his pugnacious Piano Concerto (1931), in some respects the dark dissonance and contrapuntal cruelty of the Fourth can hardly have come as a complete shock to its first audiences.
And it wasn’t just its musical lineage that prophesied the brutality of this symphony. Coming after the horrors of the First World War (which Vaughan Williams witnessed at first hand) and just before the misery of yet another global confrontation, the Fourth – for all its obstinate obscurity and proud concealment – is a work profoundly influenced by its surrounding chaos and grief. RVW was always keen to stress the Fourth’s purely musical form, its debt to Beethoven and others, along with its marvellous symphonic logic (it is perhaps the most classically formed of the nine, lending its savagery an even more severe power). But we can’t, and don’t need to, ignore its contexts and role as a ruthless prediction of further mechanised warfare (along with mechanised minds: the robots of Nazism or the politicians sleepwalking into turmoil) which was just around the corner, or was even already underway.
More than simply a harsh means to shock the complacent, Vaughan Williams’s Fourth is a fusion of requiem, warning and documentary – showcasing the terrors and revulsions of past and present-day tensions via symphonic resources. It addressed international conflict with a universal language, one that spoke then as it should speak to us now: alarming us to carnage, alerting us to consequences, counselling us to resolution.
For all that, there is nothing remotely preachy about this symphony, and it is in its musical brilliance that it most clearly enunciates: shouting and screaming, bellowing and bawling. It is an enormously fun work, a riot of danger and dexterity, abruptness and adroitness, from the grinding dissonance of its opening to the vicious regurgitation of the final moments. It mocks us, laughs at us, slaps us in the chops, jeering, goading, provoking. It is a dazzling, strident symphony of jarring distress and insistent excitement – a cacophony, but an assiduously entertaining one.
Two Great Recordings:
Bernard Haitink / London Philharmonic Orchestra (EMI/Warner)
Antonio Pappano / London Symphony Orchestra (LSO Live)
Dr David Vernon is the author of four books: Disturbing the Universe: Wagner’s Musikdrama, Beauty and Sadness: Mahler’s 11 Symphonies, Ada to Zembla: The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov and Beethoven: The String Quartets. His next book, Sun Forest Lake: The Symphonies and Tone Poems of Jean Sibelius, will be published in November 2024, while a study of Yukio Mishima’s novels is planned for 2025.