TWO
As well as writing about his musical ideas, Vaughan Williams devoted more and more time to his evangelising work as a lecturer. He concentrated in his lectures on the question of whether or not music could be 'national'; whether there was, or could be, a distinctive English voice. During a series of lectures at Bournemouth in the winter of 1901-2 he contrasted Germany, where public funding helped provide orchestras for almost every decent-sized town, with England, where musical education and public music making were, despite the advances of recent years, still the province of a struggling minority. With few orchestras, and few conductors - especially outside London - willing to promote new music from home, composition was often an act of futility. Before there could be a national music - and Vaughan Williams believed the phenomenon was latent and waiting to be awakened - there had to be the means of making that music. 'What we want in England', he wrote in The Vocalist in 1902, 'is real music, even if it be only a music-hall song. Provided it possess real feeling and real life, it will be worth all the off scourings of the classics in the world.'
The national music had its roots, he knew, in folk-song. He lectured on the subject all over England, using material already generally available; but the songs everyone knew were but a fraction of those in existence. Since 1898 there had been a Folk-Song Society, which had included Parry and Stanford among its vice-presidents, whose existence was more the result of the rising musical consciousness in England than due to any great desire to reintroduce these fine old tunes to the English people - that would come later, in an almost militant way. In December 1903 Vaughan Williams was giving one of his lectures at Brentwood in Essex, after which it was suggested to him that he attend a parish tea being given in the adjacent village of Ingrave for the local elderly. One such, a labourer called Mr Potiphar, told the composer that if he returned the next day he would sing him some old songs that he might not know.
So, on 4 December 1903 he collected, from Potiphar, his first folk-song, the haunting Bushes and Briars. This was the spark that ignited his creativity; on hearing it Vaughan Williams had a moment of revelation, connected as much with instinct and sentiment as with any function of the intellect. The song has a quality Vaughan Williams had also identified in Dives and Lazarus, a tune he had first come across in 1893 and which he used as the basis of one of his most enduring orchestral pieces forty years later: that, on first hearing the tune, it strikes the listener as though he has known it all his life. It has that strain of heroic melancholy and profound peace that is religiose without being religious; it is an evocation of the ancient rhythms of the English countryside and English life, stripped of sentiment and romanticism. It echoes and represents the mysticism that would become a dominant strain in Vaughan Williams's character, a substitute for orthodox religion that would increasingly inform his music.
This discovery turned Vaughan Williams's already active interest in folk-song into an obsession. It also altered, fundamentally, the entire direction of his music, and helped him to a new style in which he discovered a greater coherence and naturalness than he had felt before. He began to tour the countryside with a notebook, accosting elderly artisans and jotting down whatever tunes they could sing to him. Just as Wagner had obsessed him in his teens, and the modes in his twenties, so this new influence came to dominate him now. Speaking in 1932 of the discovery, he said that 'several of us found here in its simplest form the musical idiom which we unconsciously were cultivating in ourselves, it gave a point to our imagination; far from fettering us, it freed us from foreign influences which weighed on us, which we could not get rid of, but which we felt were not pointing in the direction in which we really wanted to go'.
The effects would be spectacularly far-reaching: folk-songs would not merely shape Vaughan Williams as a composer, they would, through him, shape a whole school of English music that would for years be indissolubly associated with the Royal College and what would come to be called the 'English musical establishment'. Holst was Vaughan Williams's main associate and accomplice in this project; later they would be joined by a younger man, George Butterworth. Parry, who shared their interests, looked upon it all benevolently, but was too old a dog to learn such new tricks, and was in any case pursuing a mood of greater introversion and reflectiveness in what would become his later orchestral works. Uninfluenced by folk-song, indebted to the German romantic mainstream and a genius sui generis, Elgar remained above, or beyond, this new obsession. When asked what he thought of the vogue for folk-music, he simply replied: 'I am folk-music.' It was consistent with the high esteem he had for himself after years of failure, self-doubt and unfulfilment of his spectacular talent. On another occasion, when asked by a young Frenchman whether he could, as an aspiring composer himself, write to Elgar, Elgar assented. When asked where he should write, Sir Edward replied: 'England is address enough for me.'
Yet for all his stated resistance to the 'national music', Elgar was, Vaughan Williams felt, as susceptible as anyone else to the newly prevailing wind: his younger colleague thought that he detected in the fifth of the Enigma Variations ('RPA') 'the same sense of familiarity, the same sense of the something peculiarly belonging to me as an Englishman which I also felt when I heard "Bushes and Briars" or "Lazarus"'. The variation, dedicated to Matthew Arnold's son Richard, a gifted amateur musician, certainly has by turns the melancholy, reflectiveness, nobility and humour that are so frequently the components of the best English folk tunes, and no discernible Brahmsian heaviness. Just as Vaughan Williams made a conscious decision to take his idiom from the people (albeit a romanticised, atavistic people), Elgar appears to have made a conscious decision to write the theme-music of Empire, of Edwardian grandeur, of a society of prosperity, certainty and (occasionally) pomp and circumstance. However different their outlooks - and Vaughan Williams was never the conservative man that his older colleague revelled in being - they were both subject to the influences of the same environment, the same culture, the same nation.
Similarly, Vaughan Williams felt that younger composers who in later years rebelled against the new orthodoxy he had created none the less owed something to it. In his own lectures on 'National Music' of 1932, he said that 'I know in my own mind that if it had not been for the folk-song movement of twenty-five years ago this young and vital school represented by such names as [William] Walton, [Arthur] Bliss, [Constant] Lambert, and Patrick Hadley would not have come into being. They may deny their own birthright; but having once drunk deep of the living water no amount of Negroid emetics or "Baroque" purgatives will enable them to expel it from their system.' He also pointed out, with reference to such as Chopin, Smetana, Wagner and Rimsky-Korsakov that there were precedents for nationalism in music before the English variety was founded. As for Stravinsky, who seems to have represented the ultimate in anti-nationalism to Vaughan Williams (though he admired some of his music), he was 'too intent on shocking the bourgeois to have time to think about making his own people "feel at home".' Referring to experiments with various influences that Stravinsky had conducted - and with scant sympathy for his life as an exile after the Russian Revolution, which of necessity dislocated him from his roots - Vaughan Williams comments that this was 'not the work of a serious composer, but rather that of the too clever craftsman, one might almost say, the feats of the precocious child.'
For all his criticism of Stravinsky for experimenting with, among other things, the 'Negroid emetic' of jazz - and the comment at the conclusion of his 1932 lectures that jazz (some of which he liked) was an art indigenous to America that sat ill in the works of a few French and German contemporary composers who made the 'pitiful effort' to 'add a little sting to their failing inventiveness by adopting a few jazz rhythms' - he, too, would eventually come under this influence. There were distant sounds of it in the next of his major works to be unveiled after this series of lectures, his Piano Concerto in C, first performed in 1933; in 1936 he would set the poems of John Skelton in Five Tudor Portraits because their rhythms were, as Elgar had told him, 'pure jazz'; he would pay homage to Henry Hall, the leader of the BBC Dance Orchestra, in his Partita for Double String Orchestra; and his great Sixth Symphony, shot through with jazz rhythms, would pay the most glaring tribute of all to the new music by featuring a solo saxophonist in its scherzo.
Back in Edwardian England, as he sought to propel his own career forward, Vaughan Williams was putting his energies more and more into writing occasional orchestral pieces. One such was the Symphonic Rhapsody, given by Dan Godfrey at Bournemouth in March 1904;...
