Article for the RVW Journal, June 2024

I would like to give whole-hearted support to your editor’s remarks in a recent edition of the Journal:

“There is more here than a man simply writing a piece of music”

Why is it, I have so often asked myself, and many other people, that VW was so unwilling to admit to any kind of descriptive material in his wonderful symphonies? They are  almost all quite clearly emotionally suggestive;  but he, his widow, and other commentators, have always been at great pains to deny the fact.

The culturally snobbish view, beloved of some scholars and programme-note writers, and much encouraged by the mighty Stravinsky, is that “abstract” music is somehow superior to descriptive. But this view has had far too long an innings. What’s wrong with emotional, descriptive music? Opera has it, Ballet has it, Film music has it. VW wrote in all three of these modes. Why was he so concerned to be “respectable” in his symphonies?

VW exclaimed: “A man might just want to write a piece of music”.

He might indeed. But it would be surprising if someone as passionate as he was totally unaffected by the world around him.

Ever since Haydn died composers haven’t been just spinning notes without some measure of descriptive content.  Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann all started to paint pictures and tell stories in their music. As for Tchaikovsky and Dvorak, they and many others in the Romantic Movement supposed that emotive description was what music was about.

The case of Mahler too was indicative. He outlined programmes for his first three symphonies. When some found them difficult to understand he published the Fourth with no programme,- and people immediately demanded to know what it was “about”! With relief scholars decided that all the rest of the symphonies after the Fourth were “abstract”, that childish description was over. I think they were quite wrong; Mahler never wrote a note that wasn’t about him. The Fifth is just as programmatic, and not only in the last two movements of Alma celebration; the Sixth and Seventh are descriptive by implication, and the Eighth and Ninth overtly so.

By the 20th century, as William Walton famously said, “It’s difficult to write a big piece like a symphony unless something terrible has happened to you”.

Well, terrible things certainly had happened to VW during his war. Ursula told me that years later he still woke up in a sweat having nightmares about them.

But in any case I would judge him a “Late Romantic”, rather than a “Modern” composer. His works are almost all imbued with strong feeling. Indeed isn’t that precisely why the musical public, and especially we, readers of the Journal, are so attracted to them?

We don’t just sit there, listening to a series of abstract notes and chords, nodding professorially. We are moved, and cannot help allowing thoughts and pictures to thrust themselves forward, which in turn can actually enrich our experience.

I remember when I was studying at the RCM in the 1960s, a bright young composer saying to me “You can’t write music like that”; (he said the same thing about Brahms). I simply replied “You can write music any way you like, as long as it moves me; and VW moves me a lot”. I was not moved by my young friend’s music, and during a longish career I’m afraid I  too often had to conduct abstract scores which I also never wanted to hear again.

I’ m not looking for anything like Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique, where the programme is primary, and the music follows it with such accuracy that I often used to feel I was conducting a movie! No, there are many different different levels of extra-musical content: simple atmosphere, suggestive mood, more direct reference, and finally exact imitation. I am perfectly at home with all four of these possibilities, from the vague luminosity of the scene-setting in the Antarctica, to the engaging sound of bumping cab-springs in the London.

Literature plays a part in VW’s sound-world too. He was a very well-read man, and three of his favourite books were Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and Hardy’s Tess of the Durbervilles. It’s quite striking how they feature in his first, middle, and last symphonies, isn’t it?

So let’s take a look at the nine wonderful works, which happened to so neatly encompass, and comment on, my own father’s lifetime (born 1899).

No. 1 (1910) is the highly descriptive, romantic, Sea Symphony. Its mythic Whitman poems are sung to celebrate a time, just before the invention of flight,  when it was still the sea which connected all the peoples of the world. Whether sung or purely orchestral, the pictures are there for all of us to enjoy.

No. 2 (1913) moves from the Sea to the City, and is also highly descriptive. An industrial London, with patches of country right in the middle of it; a stunning sound picture of  a Bloomsbury square in winter, with the heart-warming sound of street sellers; a night scene of dancing toffs and east-enders on two sides of the Thames; and a surprising and passionate left-wing hunger march to close. VW often said that this was his favourite symphony, so he can’t have been entirely against sound pictures. Of course he tried to hide the fact by suggesting that it was a symphony “by a Londoner”. But come off it Ralph, it’s a symphony “about London”.

No 3. (1921) After the Sea and the City,- the Country.

Further passionate description. He called it simply the  Pastoral,- to hide his feelings about the agony of Flanders we may suppose. If so he betrayed his own work and seriously misled the early audiences. Gradually it has become recognised (after very little help from the composer) that this magnificent music was an extraordinarily touching requiem for the First World War.

I find it a particularly powerful work. It presents itself to me as a story of four Seasons:

Summer: A beautiful sunny landscape, which turns out to be in France not England, but in either land is heavily tinged with a profound sense of tragedy.

Autumn: Deeply despondent. The bitter harvest is in lives, not corn. A  lonely trumpeter rehearses his own Last Post . He will never return. Never.

Winter:  Horses are walking in deep snow. (VW was for a time in charge of a great many of them.) Snippets of Christmas cheer in the Sergeant’s mess. A lighter mood for a while; wonderfully suggestive music.

Spring:    But then desolation. Yes it’s a time for renewal,- even for a great warm anthem for a lost generation. But there is no  renewal for the girl (nor thousands like her) whose dead fiancé played the trumpet so mournfully at Ecoivres.  In this countryside one can still trip over the skulls of the dead.

Of course this is just one possible fantasy, and certainly not VW’s. But it suggests how powerfully his music can evoke pictures, which I don’t feel do a serious disservice to the work.

No.4 (1935) Of course this symphony is programmatic too. VW is furious that, when he had so nobly written his elegy for the first war, only 17 years later Germany was turning into an armed dictatorship, and screaming abuse at minorities. The music hurls itself at us. An extraordinary zigzag motif dominates; doesn’t anyone else see a Swastika? A tragically slow, second movement of the oppressed  is followed by a demonic dance in the third. As for the last movement, frenetic jackboots march all over it, while the Swastika recurs to make sure we don’t miss the point. Ursula thought it showed the composer in one of his tempers. He thought it would show that he could write write a “modern” work. It did, but it achieved an awful lot more. Its well-springs ran deep. The fury was real.

No.5 (1943) An amazing and unexpected sure hope for the future. Since the work has its foundation in Pilgrim’s Progress it is no surprise that action and description are as present here as in the other symphonies. No exact programme; few movements in any of the symphonies are specific. But the felt meaning, the spiritual music of this confessed non-believer, captures our hearts.

No.6 (1948) Once again the after-shock of war prevails. No.3 was “about” the First; this one is “about” the Second. In the first movement the mighty challenge of war gives way to demonic music, and finally to a great hymn, which seems to stand for England and all that we were fighting for. The second movement suggests (not describes) the suffering of the peoples of Europe, the unfeeling oppression of the Nazis, even perhaps the then recent revelation of the concentration camps. The Scherzo is for me an air battle in one of our own raids,-equally horrific of course. The Yanks are there too in their B29s. Listen to the saxophone and snatches of popular songs,- (VW enjoyed movies and jazz). And then to the bombs plunging away down. This is the climax of the work, because the last movement shows us the catastrophic results of all this destruction. Nothingness. Ten minutes of pianissimo. Hamburg? Dresden? Hiroshima? VW never made his pacifist views clearer.

I defy anyone to listen to this amazing music as “abstract”. Indeed what a waste that would be.

No.7 (1952) This filmic non-symphony, full of atmosphere, though lacking in movement and conviction, is so obviously scenic that no further discussion is necessary.

No.8 (1956) We would probably all agree that there is no underlying descriptive material in this symphony, no inspiration or burning need on VW’s part. He was having fun. He was writing a Suite, a Divertimento, and very good at it he was. It’s strikingly less profound than the other eight.

No.9 (1957) VW spoke of inspiration from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the Durbervilles, and there is a certain amount of “action” in it.  More description than in No.8 certainly, but less driven than the first six.

For the first six are indeed earnest, profound, even political. Of course the programmatic content is not often as literal as Big Ben in the 2nd, or the saxophone in the 6th; it’s much more a question of powerful underlying inspiration. But they do dramatise with clear vision, in the most moving music, key features of the first half of the 20th Century,- the exact first fifty years of my father’s lifetime. No wonder he was proud to be VW’s publisher.

Because of my Dad I met the great composer a few times on his visits to Oxford in the early 1950s. I even played the violin under him in the Sheldonian Theatre. I realised an important thing about conducting on that occasion. VW was very deaf by then, and it was difficult to follow him. Why? Because as a conductor you can’t just lead, you have to be able to follow at the same time. He couldn’t follow, so we couldn’t either. I never forgot this lesson.

Kindly but formidable, VW was the greatest man I ever met. I was delighted to be able to champion his symphonies in Berlin, Vienna, Stuttgart, Boston, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and several other cities; and to record numbers 2,3,4,5 and 6 with the London Philharmonic for Decca. What a privilege.