Symphony No. 4 (Vaughan Williams)

alt=Smartly dressed European man looking towards camera|thumb|Vaughan Williams in 1922

Ralph Vaughan Williams composed his Symphony No. 4 between 1931 and 1935. Unlike his first three symphonies, it was not given a title: the composer said that it was to be understood as pure music, without any incidental or external inspiration. In contrast to many of Vaughan Williams's previous compositions, the symphony displays a severity of tone. It is in four movements, scored for a large orchestra.

The first performance was given at the Queen's Hall, London, on 10 April 1935; Adrian Boult conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra. There have been many recordings of the symphony, beginning with one made two years after the premiere featuring the BBC orchestra conducted by the composer.

Background

Towards the end of 1931 Vaughan Williams began work on a new symphony. His first (A Sea Symphony, 1910) had been for chorus and orchestra; his second (A London Symphony (1914) was purely orchestral; and his third (Pastoral Symphony, 1922) was for orchestra with solo singer. His widow, Ursula, wrote in her biography of him that the impetus to write a fourth came from an article in The Times. In August 1931 the paper carried a retrospect of the previous week’s festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music by its music critic, H. C. Colles. He wrote of modern symphonies by composers offering abstract music as a reaction against programme music:

Colles added that possibly "the only thing to do is to make good music on an old principle".

While Vaughan Williams was working on the symphony his closest friend, Gustav Holst, died. Vaughan Williams had continually had support and advice from Holst while working on previous compositions and, in Ursula's words, "he felt the loss of that loving and critical mind more deeply than ever" while completing the new work. Support came from the composer Arnold Bax (dedicatee of the symphony), the teacher and composer R. O. Morris and the conductor Adrian Boult. The work was enthusiastically received: the music critic Richard Capell reported:

Two of Vaughan Williams's younger colleagues, William Walton and Constant Lambert, are reported as calling the work "the greatest symphony since Beethoven". The London music critics were divided about the stature of the work. Neville Cardus commented that although Vaughan Williams had once been "one of our purest melodists, drawing his simple accents from English folk-tunes", he was now the opposite. "His new symphony, played superbly to-night by the BBC Orchestra under Dr Boult, has many admirable orchestral qualities, but a man might as well hang himself as look in the work for a great tune or theme". For Cardus, the symphony was the composer's most concentrated work but lacked the humanity of the London Symphony.

In The Times Colles said that the symphony "begins with excited harmonic gestures from which presently a great variety of tunes emerge" He called the slow movement "a lovely texture of wandering counterpoints" and said that the scherzo is "easily enjoyed by all and sundry at a first hearing, because it has humour which is sensitive in the opening theme and becomes broad when the tuba begins to caper in the Trio". For Capell the work as a whole "is probably not Vaughan Williams at his greatest, for it does not represent his contemplative depths. But it is one of his most vivid compositions, and the intentions are carried out with the point and strength of a master-hand".

During rehearsals the composer himself said of the work, "I don't know whether I like it, but it's what I meant". He later wrote to a friend, "I am not at all sure that I like it myself now. All I know is that it is what I wanted to do at the time". He disclaimed attempts to interpret his music as a gloss on world events. The Fourth Symphony was being written while the Nazis came to power in Germany, and commentators including Hubert Foss and Frank Howes suggested that in Vaughan Williams's work "the prophet sees the nature of naked violence triumphant in Europe", in Howes's words. Boult wrote that the symphony "brought many of us straight up against the spectacle of war, and the ghastly possibility of it. A prophet, like other great men, he foresaw the whole thing ... and surely there is no more magnificent gesture of disgust in all music than that final open fifth when the composer seems to rid himself of the whole hideous idea. The composer would have none of this; he told a friend, "I wrote it not as a definite picture of anything external – e.g. the state of Europe – but simply because it occurred to me like this – I can’t explain why".

Structure

The work is in four movements with the third and fourth linked:

A typical performance takes about 32 minutes.

Opening dissonance of the first movement:

:<score sound="1"> \relative c { \clef treble \key f \minor \time 6/4 \tempo "Allegro" 2. = 96 << { des2.~( des2 c4) } \\ { c,1.\ff } >> } </score>

Germinal motive that develops out of the opening dissonance:

:<score sound="1"> \relative c { \clef treble \key f \minor \time 6/4 \tempo "Allegro" 2. = 96 e2.-> ees-> | f-> e-> } </score>

Motive built of fourths (measure 14–15):

:<score sound="1"> { \new PianoStaff << \new Staff \relative c' { \clef treble \key f \minor \time 6/4 \tempo "Allegro" 2. = 96 \partial 2*1 f2--\ff | bes-- ees-- <ges des>--~ | <ges des>8 } \new Staff \relative c' { \clef bass \key f \minor \time 6/4 <c bes bes,>2-- | <f c ees, ees,>-- <f bes, bes, bes,>-- <des ges, f, f,>--~ | <des ges, f, f,>8 } >> } </score>

Instrumentation

The symphony is scored for a large orchestra including: 2 or 3 flutes (2nd doubling on piccolo), 2 or 3 oboes (2nd doubling on cor anglais), 2 clarinets (in B), bass clarinet (in B) (ad lib.), 2 bassoons, contrabassoon (ad lib.), 4 horns (in F), 2 trumpets (in C), 3 trombones, tuba, percussion (timpani, triangle, side drum, cymbals, bass drum), and strings.

Later performances, publication and manuscript

The American premiere was given on 19 December 1935 by the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Artur Rodziński. The German premiere was on 8 January 1936 in Munich, conducted by Boult. The Australian premiere was in Sydney on 6 July 1937, conducted by Malcolm Sargent. The symphony was not performed in Canada until 2013; Bramwell Tovey conducted.

The Oxford University Press published the score in 1935. A grant from the Vaughan Williams Trust enabled the Department of Manuscripts of what is now the British Library to purchase the autographed full score of the symphony in 1960. The only autographed manuscript music by Vaughan Williams hitherto preserved in the department's own collections was the Concerto Accademico for violin and string orchestra of 1925, although the department also held the autographed full score of the Sinfonia Antartica on indefinite loan from the Royal Philharmonic Society. The manuscript of the F minor symphony contains several passages later discarded and numerous corrections by the composer.

Recordings

The first recording, made two years after the premiere, featured the composer himself conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra in what proved to be his only commercial recording of any of his symphonies. It was released on 78-rpm discs in the UK by His Master's Voice and in the US by RCA Victor, and has been reissued on LP and CD. In his 1972 study of Vaughan Williams's symphonies Hugh Ottaway wrote that "for sheer ferocity" the composer's own recording remained unsurpassed.

{|class="wikitable plainrowheaders" style="text-align: left; margin-right: 0;"

! scope="col" |Conductor

! scope="col" |Orchestra

! scope="col" |Year

! scope="col" |Ref

|Ralph Vaughan Williams

|BBC Symphony

|1937

|Sir Adrian Boult

|NBC Symphony

|1938

|Leopold Stokowski

|NBC Symphony

|1943

|Sir John Barbirolli

|BBC Symphony

|1950

|Dimitri Mitropoulos

|New York Philharmonic

|1953

|Sir Adrian Boult

|London Philharmonic

|1953

|Dimitri Mitropoulos

|New York Philharmonic

|1956

|Sir Malcolm Sargent

|BBC Symphony

|1963

|Leonard Bernstein

|New York Philharmonic

|1965

|Sir Adrian Boult

|New Philharmonia

|1968

|André Previn

|London Symphony

|1969

|Norman Del Mar

|BBC Scottish Symphony

|1973

|Colin Davis

|Boston Symphony

|1973

|Paavo Berglund

|Royal Philharmonic

|1979

|Bryden Thomson

|London Symphony

|1987

|Gennady Rozhdestvensky

|USSR State Symphony

|1988

|Vernon Handley

|Royal Liverpool Philharmonic

|1991

|Leonard Slatkin

|Philharmonia

|1991

|Andrew Davis

|BBC Symphony

|1992

|Bernard Haitink

|London Philharmonic

|1996

|Roger Norrington

|London Philharmonic

|1997

|Richard Hickox

|London Symphony

|2001

|Paul Daniel

|Bournemouth Symphony

|2003

|Leon Botstein

|American Symphony

|2006

|Sir Colin Davis

|London Symphony

|2008

|Peter Oundjian

|Toronto Symphony

|2011

|Carlos Kalmar

|Oregon Symphony

|2011

|Mark Wigglesworth

|London Philharmonic

|2013

|Robert Spano

|Atlanta Symphony

|2014

|Sir Mark Elder

|Hallé

|2016

|Andrew Manze

|Royal Liverpool Philharmonic

|2016

|Sir Antonio Pappano

|London Symphony

|2020

Symphony No. 4 (Vaughan Williams)

Background

Structure

Instrumentation

Later performances, publication and manuscript

Recordings

Notes, references and sources

Notes

References

Sources

Further reading

External links