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PROGRAM NOTES
by Phillip Huscher
Ralph Vaughan Williams – Symphony No. 5 in D Major
Born October 12, 1872, Gloucestershire, England.
Died August 26, 1958, London, England.
Symphony No. 5 in D Major
Vaughan Williams made his first sketches for this symphony in 1936, began composition in earnest in 1938, completed
the work early in 1943, and made minor revisions in 1951. The first performance was given on June 24, 1943, at a
Promenade Concert in Royal Albert Hall, with the composer conducting the London Philharmonic. The score calls for two
flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, three trombones,
timpani, and strings. Performance time is approximately forty-two minutes.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s first subscription concert performances of Vaughan Williams’s Fifth Symphony were
given at Orchestra Hall on March 22 and 23, 1945, with Désiré Defauw conducting. Our most recent subscription concert
performances were given on April 16, 17, and 18, 1987, with Leonard Slatkin conducting.
Very early in the twentieth century, Ralph Vaughan Williams began to attract attention as a composer of tuneful songs.
But, he eventually declared himself a symphonist, and over the next few years—the time of La mer, Pierrot lunaire, and
The Rite of Spring—that tendency alone branded him as old-fashioned. His first significant large-scale work, the Fantasia
on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, composed in 1910, is indebted to the music of his sixteenth-century predecessor and to the
great English tradition. His entire upbringing was steeped in tradition—he was related both to the pottery Wedgwoods and
Charles Darwin. (“The Bible says that God made the world in six days,” his mother told him. “Great Uncle Charles thinks
it took longer: but we need not worry about it, for it is equally wonderful either way.”) He became a serious student of
English folk song and edited The English Hymnal.
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In 1908, at the age of thirty-five, Vaughan Williams took some time off from composing to study with Ravel, gaining, as a
result, immeasurably in his understanding of color and sonority, yet always maintaining—even sharpening—his own
personal style. Years later Ravel would call him “the only one of my pupils who does not write my music.” In fact, Vaughan
Williams was one of the first composers in the twentieth century who managed to forge a strong personal style almost
exclusively from the materials of the past. “My advice to young composers,” he wrote, “is learn your own language first,
find out your own traditions, discover what you want to do.”
By 1934, following the deaths of Elgar, Holst, and Delius—all within a few months of each other—Vaughan Williams came
to represent the end of the line, at least for English music. He continued to compose in his signature style, with its firm
reliance on tonality and its fondness for conventional forms. In a career that lasted more than fifty years, from the Tallis
Fantasy to the last of his nine symphonies in 1957, Vaughan Williams’s language remained remarkably stable, impervious
to the continual winds of revolution. Despite his conviction that “the composer must not shut himself up and think about
art; he must live with his fellows and make his art an expression of the whole life of the community,” Vaughan William
eventually became something of a lone figure in modern music—a preserver of tradition who managed to brilliantly
transcend the limited genre of the staunch conservative.
Vaughan Williams’s nine symphonies, which span nearly fifty years of his career, form an unusual and distinctive
expansion of the great nineteenth century tradition. The first, A Sea Symphony, premiered in 1910—just five weeks after
the Tallis Fantasy—sets word by Walt Whitman, and is more cantata than symphony. It was followed four years later by A
London Symphony, his first purely orchestral symphony, a kind of tone poem in four parts devoted to the composer’s
adopted hometown. (It was originally begun as a symphonic poem.) Vaughan William’s third essay in the form, the
Pastoral Symphony, begun in 1916, when he was in France with the Royal Army Medical Corps, is haunted not by the
genial landscape of Beethoven’s Pastoral, but by the battle-scarred fields of wartime France. (The finale, crowned by the
sound of the soprano voice, singing wordlessly from offstage, finds hope and peace.) Vaughan Williams completed his
Pastoral in 1921; it was a full decade before he began a new symphony. Symphony no. 4, composed in the early 1930s,
was so unexpectedly fierce and aggressive, so uncharacteristically confrontational, that it was quickly interpreted as a
bleak statement about the state of the world. Vaughan Williams’s friends even tried to persuade him to title it “Europe
1935,” after the year of its premiere. “I wrote it not as a definite picture of anything external,” the composer said in
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defense, “but simply because it occurred to me like this.” It was Ursula Vaughan Williams, the composer’s wife, who saw
what no one else seemed to notice—how closely it reflected Vaughan Williams’s own character: “The towering furies of
which he was capable, his fire, pride, and strength are all revealed and so are his imagination and lyricism.”
Although Vaughan Williams would write five more symphonies, it was his next, Symphony no. 5, that stands at the summit
of his achievement. It has sometimes been viewed as a rebuttal to the defiant Fourth Symphony, but it is really an
outgrowth and a refinement of that career-altering work, and it sums up much of what he had accomplished to date as a
symphonic composer. It also does represent a shifting of gears, because for the first time Vaughan Williams channeled
his dream of writing an opera based on The Pilgrim’s Progress into purely orchestral music.
Vaughan Williams had been fixated on the idea of writing a musical setting of John Bunyan’s late seventeenth-century
religious novel from the beginning of his career. He began an opera—or “morality” as he preferred to call it—on the
Bunyan allegory at least as early as 1906 and worked on it in fits and starts throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. But by
the late thirties, he was apparently convinced that, despite his obsession with the subject and the large amount of music
he had already written, the work would never be finished. Sometime in 1938, when Vaughan Williams began his Fifth
Symphony, he decided to use substantial sections from the unfinished Pilgrim’s Progress, in the process transforming
music that otherwise might have gone to waste into prime symphonic material.
The symphony begins with a pair of horns in D major entering over a low C, a haunting and ambiguous opening that
suggests, from the start, that the beauty of Vaughan Williams’s symphony will be in its struggle. For a while, the music
switches continually between C and D, and between major and minor. Vaughan Williams quotes from “For All the Saints,”
one of the four original hymns he contributed to The English Hymnal in 1906. (We are now in E major.) The movement
continues in its shifting, unpredictable course, leading eventually to what appears to be an ending in bright G major, but
finally ending as uncertainly as it began. (In the last bars, the violas and cellos play C and D together.)
The second-movement scherzo alternates between quiet anxiety and rich, lush melody. Here, as in the first movement,
the harmonies are often modal, recalling the old English music Vaughan Williams loved, and also lending another layer of
ambiguity to the symphony, as it switches in and out of harmonic focus.
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When the symphony was first performed, Vaughan Williams openly admitted its substantial debt to the unfinished
Pilgrim’s Progress, but he insisted that the slow movement, a broad and lyrical Romanza, provided the only dramatic
connection to the Bunyan allegory. He even wrote a passage taken from Bunyan into his manuscript at the top of the
Romanza: “Upon this place stood a cross, and a little below a sepulcher. Then he said: ‘He hath given me rest by his
sorrow, and life by his death.’” (The inscription was not included in the printed score.) In the opera, those words are given
to the same poignant melody the english horn plays to launch this movement.
As in the Fourth Symphony by Brahms, another lover of music from earlier times, Vaughan Williams’s finale is designed
like a baroque passacaglia—a series of variations over a repeated bass. This is music of surpassing certainty and
resolution. The supremacy of D major is indisputable, and the shadows of the old modal harmonies have been banished.
The D major horn music from the first page of the symphony returns unchallenged. Vaughan Williams quotes another
hymn tune, “All Creatures of Our God and King.” The final pages bring relief, serenity, and peace.
Footnotes. Vaughan Williams dedicated this symphony “without permission and with the sincerest flattery to Jean
Sibelius, whose great example is worthy of imitation” (in the published score that was simplified to “Dedicated without
permission to Jean Sibelius”). Sibelius heard the work for the first time in November 1946, when it was performed in
Helsinki. Vaughan Williams eventually returned to work on The Pilgrim’s Progress and completed the score in 1949, more
than four decades after his first sketches. The premiere was given at Covent Garden in London, on April 26, 1951. Finally,
Vaughan Williams’s first name is pronounced Rafe. “Any other pronunciation used to drive him mad,” Ursula said.
Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
© by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. All rights reserved. Program notes may not be reproduced; brief excerpts may be
quoted if due acknowledgment is given to the author and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
These notes appear in galley files and may contain typographical or other errors. Programs and artists subject to change
without notice.
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