Ralph Vaughan Williams is one of the most important English composers of the twentieth century and a leading figure of the British musical renaissance. He was also a teacher, a writer and a conductor.
Vaughan Williams’s road to recognition was a fairly long one, and despite the approval of influential critics as early as the turn of the century, the wider significance of his work was only grasped shortly before the Second World War. Vaughan Williams was on good terms with the BBC, which did much to promote his music, and the publishing house Oxford University Press also played a major part in the composer’s life; the recording industry, on the other hand, was something he had little to do with, and even after the Second World War his music was comparatively poorly represented in record catalogues. In the cinema, by contrast, Vaughan Williams expressed himself readily and often, above all during the 1940s. In his final years his music was no longer especially highly regarded in England, while in the United States he was ranked alongside Hindemith, Prokofiev and Sibelius, and America’s finest conductors all but fought for the chance to give his works their American premieres.
Ralph Vaughan Williams’s influence on his contemporaries was strongest in the interwar period, and it can be heard even in the music of Britten and Tippett, to say nothing of Howells, Finzi and Rubbra. Some musicologists believe that Vaughan Williams’s musical thinking, rooted in an ethnic simplicity, left its mark on The Beatles and on early progressive rock. A certain revival of his music could be observed around the time when the contemplative music of Górecki and Tavener came into fashion.
“Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis” is one of Vaughan Williams’s most popular works, and in it one can clearly hear the influence that the music of English Renaissance composers had on him. Vaughan Williams used a melody by Thomas Tallis (c. 1505–1585), written in the second half of the sixteenth century for the Archbishop of Canterbury’s psalter.
Aaron Copland’s Clarinet Concerto was commissioned by one of the most celebrated jazz clarinettists of his day, Benny Goodman. It is worth recalling that although Goodman was known as the King of Swing and most people will remember him precisely as a figure from outside the classical world, he turned to classical music quite often – he played Mozart and commissioned music from his contemporaries, Aaron Copland among them.
Copland set to work with pleasure and produced a two-movement piece in which the movements are linked by the soloist’s cadenza, an extended solo passage. Of the slow, beautiful first movement Copland said that he wanted “to make every listener weep with emotion”. The second movement, meanwhile, is said to be a cocktail of the most characteristic elements of North and South American music – the listener will catch something of the Charleston, something of boogie-woogie and something of Brazil’s beguiling rhythms as well.
Benny Goodman was an outstanding musician, but when he saw what Copland had written he fairly quickly declined the honour of giving the concerto its first performance, because the composer had thoroughly enjoyed himself writing super-virtuosic music that makes the soloist sweat. The two years Goodman had demanded as the concerto’s exclusive performer had almost run out when the musician finally pulled himself together, learned the piece and, in the autumn of 1950, brilliantly played the solo part in Copland’s masterpiece dedicated to him.
Aaron Copland was born into a family of Russian emigrants in Brooklyn, New York, and studied music in Europe. Copland’s style is often called cosmopolitan, and the most clearly distinguishable ingredients in his music are neoclassicism, jazz, and American and Latin American folk music.
Copland is considered a pioneer of professional classical music in the United States, and alongside that title mention must certainly also be made of his role in sustaining the nation’s patriotic spirit through musical means (especially during the Second World War years). Various reference sources will tell you that it was Copland who showed Americans how to compose their own national classical music – and his contribution to education (including the development of the Tanglewood summer course programme) and to championing contemporary music is undeniable in any case.
Copland composed ballets, symphonies, symphonic works, concertos, a small number of chamber works, and music for films and theatre productions.
The latest member of the so-called Viennese Classical triumvirate (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven), Ludwig van Beethoven composed nine symphonies; the tenth remained a sketch.
On 22 December that year the Theater an der Wien saw the premiere of Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth Symphonies. Of the Sixth the composer said that it was an attempt to paint with sound, while the programme booklet for the premiere described it as more an expression of feeling than a painting. The audience was apparently not greatly taken with this canvas the first time round; to the composer’s contemporaries the work seemed too long and lacking in expression.
Beethoven himself provided a written programme for his Sixth, but at the same time insisted that these were merely subjective impressions. Most important of all: he urged listeners to remember that one should not give in to overly vivid pictorial impressions of an illustrative kind, since in the end they can hinder the perception of the music’s essence. It may well be that Claude Debussy failed to heed this advice, judging the Sixth Symphony to be a genius’s blind wandering. Anyone who has seen the Disney studio’s splendid animated film with its little pegasi, cupids, a merrily tipsy Bacchus, Zeus’s thunderbolts and the love games of young centaurs may say that better film music has perhaps never been heard.
This work differs from a classical symphony in having five movements instead of the usual four. The full title of the first movement is “Awakening of cheerful feelings on arrival in the countryside”, and its main theme is borrowed from a Bohemian folk song. In the manuscript of the second movement, “Scene by the brook”, the composer noted specific birds: the flute draws the nightingale, the oboe portrays the quail, while the clarinet is entrusted with the role of the cuckoo. The full title of the fifth movement is “Shepherd’s song; cheerful and thankful feelings after the storm”, and at its beginning, over a pedal C, one hears the motif of the Swiss folk melody Ranz des vaches.
Ints Dālderis – clarinet