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The Power and the Passion
| Article
# : |
19661 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1991 |
1,876 Words |
| Author
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Robert R. Reilly
Robert R. Reilly's second part of his article on English music
appears in the August 1990 issue of The World & I. |
If Edward Elgar was the foundation stone of the English neorenaissance, his contemporary, Frederick Delius (1862-1934), was the mortar. Delius created a type of highly lyrical, close to diaphanous music that exists as a kind of halo around the more substantial and substantive compositions of Elgar and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Delius, an atheist with a strong dose of English eccentricity, spent most of his adult life in France. There he produced a series of works close to, but not quite like, that of the French musical impressionists. His best pieces are evanescent, fragile, and serene. Delius said, "A sense of flow is the main thing, and it doesn't matter how you do it so long as you master it."
Far more important musically was Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958), the major figure in the first wave of composers to follow Elgar. Vaughan Williams came to typify the anomalies and achievements of English twentieth-century music. One of his first major successes was Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis for double string orchestra. Vaughan Williams was immersed in English folk song and hymnody. For the Fantasia, he took a melody from a group of Psalm Tunes composed by Tallis in 1567, which he has discovered while editing a totally new English hymnal.
The son of a clergyman, though himself not a believer, Vaughan Williams nevertheless imbued his works with a deep spirituality. He wrote many very moving, explicitly religious works, which only deepens the mystery of their inspiration.
Here in Vaughan Williams we find the perfect example of the effects of the two-century break in the continuity of English music. The Elizabethan influence mixes with that of modernity to produce a sound that, while twentieth century, is hard to place chronologically and is certainly conservative. While Vaughan Williams created a distinctive voice for English music and is perhaps the premier English musical nationalist, he is also held responsible for ushering in a tide of conservatism from which English composers did not free themselves until the 1960s. His striking individuality has absolutely nothing to do with the avant-garde. Oblivious to and uninterested in the radical musical developments on the Continent, he contented himself with ingeniously adapting the principles derived from folk song to larger orchestral forms.
His output was prolific and uneven. He wrote nine symphonies, five of them after he was seventy. The unconventional ways in which he put these works together can give them great expressive power, or, in the weaker works, make them
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