Symphony No. 9 (Vaughan Williams)

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Symphony No. 9 in E Minor was written by the British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams in the years 1956-1957 and premiered under conductor Malcolm Sargent in April 1958, when the composer was 85. Vaughan Williams’s original idea was to create a programmatic symphony based on Thomas Hardy's book Tess of the D'Urbervilles, even though the programmatic elements eventually disappeared as work on the composition progressed. Existing sketches clearly indicate that in the early stages of composition, certain passages relate to specific people and events in the novel. The instrumentation of this symphony includes three saxophones and a flugelhorn as well as quite a large percussion section, and the overall mood is quite enigmatic.

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 the Sixth. 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 work is in four movements:

Moderato maestoso

Andante sostenuto

Scherzo: Allegro pesante

Andante tranquillo

It is worth noting that the opening theme of the slow movement comes from music Vaughan Williams had composed more than 50 years earlier: A Sea Symphony and an even earlier, unpublished tone poem from 1904 called The Solent. The composer himself called the drumbeat music that immediately follows this theme, “the ghostly drummer of Salisbury Plain.”

The public and the press reacted with noticeable dissatisfaction at first; the general view was that the composer in his mid-80s was losing his powers of invention, and the many subtleties of expression in the score went largely unnoticed. This attitude has kept the symphony from having the kind of sustained performance history that most of the others have enjoyed, as have the unusual instrumental requirements.