Vaughan Williams on Music (review)

Reading the prose writings of major composers is always a dangerous business. While such writings undoubtedly illuminate aspects of a creative mind by filling in biographical details or fleshing out personal beliefs, the temptation to extrapolate from the writings to the musical works themselves is difficult to resist. The results, all too frequently, are misconceptions and half-truths about specific works, even about composers' styles as a whole. Thus the emotional outpourings of Hector Berlioz's Mémoires prompt critics to fasten upon the "arch-romantic" features of the Symphonie fantastique even as they ignore the classicizing tendencies of Harold en Italie. By the same token, Igor Stravinsky's anti-romantic polemics encourage notions of the arid and "objectivist" works of the interwar years that overlook their stylistic and aesthetic points of contact with the "Russian" ballets written before World War I.

A similar fate befalls Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose prose essays have particularly influenced perceptions of his music that are misleading and often downright wrong. These perceptions, inevitably, revolve around the subjects of folksong and English musical nationalism—subjects about which the composer did indeed write copiously. But he also wrote about much else, including the music of continental European composers, and it is this failure to recognize the broad range of his interests that is the source of so much of the trouble. It has not only prevented listeners from noting the continental influences, from J. S. Bach through Maurice Ravel, that so obviously permeate his music, but also promoted serious misunderstanding about the very nature of his nationalism. Vaughan Williams's nationalism derived from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conceptions of nationhood as a force for social and political progress, and had virtually nothing in common with the aggressive xenophobia that emerged in full force only in the twentieth century. And yet, it is precisely in these latter, pejorative terms that his nationalism has come to be viewed—aided, again, by a selective, not to mention highly politicized, reading of his prose writings. Here, the modernist hijacking of the moral high ground, whereby "advanced" styles have become associated with musical internationalism and "conservative" styles with musical nationalism, is particularly at fault.

Admittedly, Vaughan Williams is himself partially responsible for these misunderstandings. A polemicist of the highest order, he frequently overstated his case to make a point. This is especially true of the later essays when, as Alain Frogley and others have suggested, his iconic status as the personification of English music seems to have clouded his judgment. Nor does it help that the one collection of his essays that has long been available in print—National Music (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), later editions (London: Ox ford University Press, 1963 and 1987) are supplemented by other essays—draws on writings that principally come from this later period (the 1930s through the 1950s). All the more reason, then, to welcome this new publication, edited by David Manning, which reprints in an easily accessible form a wide range of the composer's essays and commentaries, many of them from early in his career. All 102 readings in the book have been printed before, but mostly in obscure British periodicals that are accessible only to the specialized scholar; a few appeared among the occasional essays on music reprinted in Heirs and Rebels (ed. Ursula Vaughan Williams and Imogen Holst [London: Oxford University Press, 1959]), the published correspondence between Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst. The rationale has been to include writings that do not appear in the various editions of National Music, with the result that fully forty percent of the readings date from before 1930. A number of these come from around 1900—before Vaughan Williams had made his name as a composer—and we read with interest of his early engagement with the music of Johannes Brahms, Robert Schu mann, Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss and others, as well as of his strong opinions about the importance of self-expression and the need to avoid...