Symphony No. 6 (Vaughan Williams)

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Ralph Vaughan Williams's Symphony in E minor, known as Symphony No. 6, was composed in 1944-1948, during and immediately after World War II. Dedicated to Michael Mullinar, it was first performed by Sir Adrian Boult and the BBC Symphony Orchestra in April 1948. Within a year’s time it had received some 100 performances. Vaughan Williams, very nervous about this symphony, threatened several times to tear up the draft. At the same time, his program note for the first performance took a defiantly flippant tone.

The composer never intended the symphony to be programmatic, but it was inevitable that his post-war audience should associate its disturbing and often violent character with the detonation of the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In connection with the last movement, the composer did suggest that a quotation from Act IV of Shakespeare's The Tempest comes close to the music’s meaning: "We are such stuff / As dreams are made on; and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep." The Symphony is noteworthy for its unusually discordant harmonic language, reminiscent in approach if not in technique of his F Minor Symphony from over a decade earlier, and by its inclusion of a tenor saxophone among the woodwinds. In several respects this symphony marks the beginning of Vaughan Williams’s experiments with orchestration that so characterize his late music.

Vaughan Williams did not number his symphonies as he composed them (he referred to them only by title or key) until the appearance of the Ninth, which is in the same key as this symphony. At that point he assigned numbers to them, beginning with the F minor, in order to avoid confusion. The first three are as well known by their titles as by their numbers.

The symphony is in four linked movements (i.e. the movements lead straight into one another with no pause between them), and includes a number of ideas that return in various guises throughout the symphony, for example the use of simultaneous chords a half-step apart, or the short-short-long rhythmic figure.

1. Allegro - the symphony begins very loudly with the full orchestra playing simultaneously in F Minor and E Minor. The chaotic rush of notes makes the listener’s job of getting or keeping bearings relatively difficult. Because the composer uses so many disruptive techniques in both rhythm and harmony, there is often no clear sense of meter or key. Structurally, the movement falls loosely into the category of sonata form with its carefully organized contrasting themes and key centers, though this may not be apparent on first hearing. Indeed, the most striking point of contrast may be the reappearance near the end of the movement of one of the main themes in a clear and rich E Major. The first movement ends with a sustained unison E in the low instruments, at which point
2. Moderato - the second movement begins a tritone away, in B-flat Minor. The main themes are so chromatic that they eventually have little sense of profile or character. A central feature of this movement is a "rat-a-tat" rhythmic motive that recurs through most of the movement, beginning in the second measure. At one point that figure goes away for a while, and the effect of its eventual return is an almost palpable sense of dread. After an enormous battering climax fuelled by that figure (including the single loudest point in the entire symphony), the movement winds down with a lengthy solo played by the cor anglais, still accompanied by the same three-note ostinato. The sustained last note links via a half-step drop to the
3. Scherzo: Allegro vivace - This movement, heavily fugal in texture, follows a typical scherzo/trio structure, but the overall feel is hardly one of amusement; the high spirits are decidedly raucous and sardonic. Although the rhythmic style is less disjointed than in the first movement (the listener has little trouble following the meter here), the harmony (heavily dominated by tritones) and orchestration both revert to the first movement’s density. The trio section features the saxophone’s only true solo role in the symphony; when the scherzo material recurs the composer turns the fugue subject upside down and eventually combines that form with the original version. With the final climax (the trio theme stated by full orchestra) the music almost collapses, leaving the bass clarinet holding the sustained note that links to
4. Epilogue: Moderato – This movement follows a vaguely fugal structure but that structure is not especially perceptible to the listener because the entire movement is marked ‘’pp’’, meaning played very softly, with the further admonishment ‘’senza espressivo’’, meaning without any expression. This makes the movement extremely difficult to play (even though it is slow), and the audience must use great concentration to keep from losing track of the composer’s train of thought. Vaughan Williams himself, in his above-mentioned program note, speaks of “drifting” and “whiffs of theme” in characterizing the music. This is the movement that sparked so many to see the work as a whole as being a vision of a post-nuclear world. Writers have used such words as ‘’dead’’, ‘’barren’’, and ‘’ruins’’ to describe it. Curiously enough, both the second and fourth movements have the same tempo marking but the feel is decidedly slower here.

The symphony continues to provoke much speculation about its “meaning,” which is understandable if somewhat misguided. A typical performance takes about 35 minutes.

[edit] Trivia

1. The first two recordings of this symphony, made by Sir Adrian Boult and Leopold Stokowski within two days of one another in early 1949, use the original version of the third movement; the composer revised that movement in 1950.

2. Part of the First Movement (Allegro) of the Sixth Symphony was used as the theme tune for the ITV drama A Family at War.