Vaughan Williams...and Edward Heath
Thoughts following RVW's Symphony No 5 at the Proms
Michael McManus 4:11pm GMT 17th August 2012
Sir Edward Heath used to joke that the unsigned copies of his books were worth more than the signed ones and he probably had a point, as the groaning book-shelves of charity shops up and down the land still testify. In the 1970s, with his three ‘coffee table’ books on, respectively, sailing, music and travels, he effectively began the trend for celebrity book signing tours. His book on music is a strange hybrid, combining personal anecdotes (many of them unintentionally funny) with a slightly ingenuous ‘beginner’s guide’ to classical music. I helped to edit a second edition of the music book in 1997 and one anecdote has always remained with me.
As I sat in the Royal Albert Hall yesterday evening, listening to Andrew Manze and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in finely-wrought and breathtakingly beautiful performances of the middle trio of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s symphonies, I suddenly found my thoughts drifting to a very different evening in the same hall, when the world premiere of the Fifth Symphony took place on June 24, 1943 attended by one Major ERG Heath, who had recently completed a tour of duty in charge of an anti-aircraft battery defending Liverpool against the onslaught of the Luftwaffe:
‘For once there was no question of queuing; the audience was thinly scattered about the hall…Was the Fifth to be an evocation of the war itself, or was it to be a commentary on it in human terms, filled either with despair or with the patriotic fervour of a previous generation? Vaughan Williams…had never been noted for his conducting, but the bareness and simplicity of his gestures seemed all of a piece with the nobility of the music that followed. An air-raid warning had been given before the concert began, but all that slipped from our minds as we listened, absorbed, to this quiet, almost diffident restatement of faith. As the last movement merged into the well-known chorale Lasst uns Erfreuen…hope returned to us’.
These are difficult days too, with their own existential challenges, but perhaps last night’s full house may have derived a similar spiritual comfort from the balm and dignity of this most English of symphonies.
Comments
Thank you for this Michael. Wasn't the whole concert superb? I loved the way the music-making seemed to reveal all of VW - the rugged energy (one newspaper critic thought the pacing too fast: I didn't) as well as the spiritual strength - without point-scoring. I had doubts whether three VW symphonies would be too much, but it wasn't, especially with the 5th at the heart of the programme.
And of course there's that striking recording of VW conducting the 5th at the 1952 Proms, with the LPO, which Somm released in 2007.
I wish I could have been there, but pleased to see it on BBC 4 as an alternative, I thought the performances were wonderful. I love and know well all the VW symphonies but to hear no. 5 sandwiched between performances of 4 and 6 seemed to give it greater meaning somehow. Despite owning several recordings of all three, I have never listened to all three in a row before - I think I will again.
I was left wondering again, why are these symphonies not programmed more often? What looked like a full house surely shows that there is no lack of demand.