"O Thou Transcendent," The Life of Ralph Vaughan Williams

In the opening moments of Tony Palmer's "O Thou Transcendent," the film's central point, and a calling card of contemporary scholarship on the composer, is introduced. The radio announcer for Classic FM informs his audience that Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending has landed, by popular vote, the number one spot in the station's classical "Hall of Fame." The background is established: that Vaughan Williams is widely understood—sometimes loved, sometimes loathed for it—as the greatest representative, even as a symbol, of a comfortable, slightly saccharine English pastoralism. Palmer spends much of the rest of the film seeking to convince us that this understanding is poorly or partially informed at best, and that any fair assessment of the composer's life and music will reveal instead his remarkable depth, range, relevance, and humanity.

One of the film's strengths, and one of the ways Palmer supports the central point, is found in the variety and quality of interviews. Imogen Holst talks about Vaughan Williams's long and fruitful friendship with her father, Gustav; Michael Tippett, sounding a recurring motif, admits that "through [Vaughan Williams] we were made free"; Mark-Anthony Turnage confesses to having loved the composer's music as a "vice" before his recent scholarly rehabilitation. A number of others could be mentioned, from John Adams to Tony Benn, Michael Kennedy to Ursula Vaughan Williams, the composer's second wife, but despite the real interest generated by individual interviews, none is ever allowed to dismantle the argument. Palmer's control over the material is very strong; contradiction is almost entirely absent. His vision of history, or at least of films about musical history, seems to hinge on the idea that the truth is subversive, but that all the people most closely connected to a situation share a grasp of that subversive truth.

Related to this idea of the subversive nature of truth is Palmer's tendency to insist on correlations between music and image. Montages accompany most lengthy excerpts of Vaughan Williams's music. For some excerpts, the montage seems innocent enough: The Lark Ascending alternates between images of the solo violinist, backlit by light pouring through stained glass, and shots of the English countryside. Here the images confirm in a simplistic way a general understanding of the appeal of the piece and also of the parochialism detractors of Vaughan Williams find in his music. Another example suggests a more willful filmmaker. During an extended excerpt from the Sixth Symphony, which Vaughan Williams famously denied as being about war, Palmer assembles a lengthy concatenation of scenes of mass graves, woodlands, orchestral players, marching soldiers, an array of more recent war images including a stealth fighter, and finally a photo of the composer looking pensive. The spoken message of the film—that Vaughan Williams is more than the quintessential amateurish pastoralist—seems to be expanded during these montages into an appeal to hear Vaughan Williams encoding existential struggle in the sounds themselves. This would be very subversive truth indeed, but it is not an inevitable one. Perhaps these moments of the film are best thought of as Palmer's creative rejoinder, based on his personal experience of the music and its composer.

Finally, the montages do not prevent the film from succeeding as informative biopic, earnest homage, engaging narrative, or committed introduction to the music, and for all of those reasons it is recommended.