A Sea Symphony

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A Sea Symphony is a choral symphony by Ralph Vaughan Williams , composed between 1903 and 1909. It is the first and at the same time longest symphony by Vaughan Williams. It was premiered at the Leeds Festival in 1910 under the direction of the composer on his 38th birthday. The musical maturity of the work belies the composer's young age. Vaughan Williams was 30 when he started composing. The Sea Symphony is next to the 8th Symphony Mahler , which was about the same period, in which the chorus is used as a permanent element, and an integral part of one of the first score Sinfonien. This made it a model for a new era of symphonic music in England in the first half of the 20th century . The work is sometimes referred to as Vaughan Williams' Symphony No. 1 .

Emergence

From 1903 to 1909, Ralph Vaughan Williams repeatedly worked on a series of songs for choir and orchestra that would ultimately become his longest symphony and his first major work ever. The opening title was The Ocean . However, the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians lists 16 earlier works by Vaughan Williams, including two with a choir. The vast majority of these works, however, are youth works that were never published and long since withdrawn by the composer. Vaughan Williams has never before attempted to publish such a large and demanding work. Like Johannes Brahms , Vaughan Williams hesitated a long time before presenting his first symphony. But then he remained a very fruitful composer until the end of his life. He composed his last symphony from 1956 to 1958 and finished it at the age of 85.

Musical structure

With a playing time of around 70 minutes, A Sea Symphony is the longest of all Vaughan Williams symphonies. Although this symphony is far removed from the old German tradition of a classical symphony, it follows the usual symphonic structure in a certain sense: fast introductory movement, slow movement, scherzo and finale. The four sentences are:

  • A Song for All Seas, All Ships - A song for all seas and all ships (baritone, soprano and choir)
  • On the Beach at Night, Alone - Alone at night on the beach (baritone and choir)
  • Scherzo: The Waves - The waves (chorus)
  • The Explorers - The Discoverers (baritone, soprano and chorus)

The first movement lasts about 20 minutes, the inner movements 11 and 8 minutes, and the final 30 minutes.

text

The text of the Sea Symphony comes from Walt Whitman's cycle of poems, Grashalme . Although these poems were fairly unknown in England at the time, they made a great impact on Vaughan Williams for their ability to incorporate both metaphysical and human perspectives. Whitman's use of "free verse" was becoming more and more popular in the creative world, where flowing structures became more popular and replaced traditional metrical forms. Vaughan Williams used the following poems in his Sea Symphony :

  • 1st movement: Song of the Exposition and Song for all Seas, all Ships
  • 2nd movement: On the Beach at Night Alone
  • 3rd movement: After the Sea-ship
  • 4th movement: Passage to India

music

Orchestration

The symphony is designed for soprano , baritone , chorus and large orchestra consisting of two flutes , piccolo , two oboes , English horn , two clarinets , clarinet, bass clarinet, two bassoons , contrabassoon , four horns , three trumpets , three trombones , Tuba , timpani (F # 2-F3), percussion ( snare drum , bass drum , triangle , tambourine , cymbal ), two harps , organ , and strings .

In order to enable the work to be performed a larger number of times, Vaughan Williams has also considered a smaller cast to be permissible.

Influences

Comparisons to Charles Villiers Stanford , Hubert Parry and Edward Elgar are obvious. Not only did all four work at the same time and in the same country, Vaughan Williams not only studied with Stanford and Parry at the Royal College of Music , but his preparations for the composition of his Sea Symphony included both Elgar's Enigma Variations (1898– 99) and his oratorio The Dream of Gerontius (1900).

A Sea Symphony is one of the best-known pieces of music that dealt with the theme of the ocean, which were written around the same time in England. This also includes Stanford's Songs of the Sea (1904) and Songs of the Fleet (1910), Elgar's Sea Pictures (1899), Frank Bridges The Sea (1910) and of course the best-known piece La Mer by Claude Debussy from France. All of these pieces may have contributed to Vaughan Williams turning to this very subject for his first major work.

Vaughan Williams studied with Maurice Ravel in Paris for three weeks in 1908 . While he worked intensively on the instrumentation , he developed a clear contrast to the German symphonic tradition, as taught by Stanford and Parry at the Royal College of Music. It was then that Vaughan Williams began to develop a greater sense of color and unusual chord progressions . His predilection for mediante relationships, which was to become a continuous harmonic principle of the Sea Symphony , may have been prepared in these studies at that time, and these harmony relationships are now becoming symptomatic of his musical style in general.

The Sea Symphony uses both the pentatonic scale and the whole scale , which was more characteristic of contemporary French music at the time. This is the kind of music Vaughan Williams had in mind when he completed the composition of the Sea Symphony from 1908 to 1909 . Ravel paid him a huge compliment by saying: "Vaughan Williams is the only one of my students who does not compose like me".

Motifs

Musically speaking, the Sea Symphony contains two strong unifying motifs . The first is a harmonic motif of two chords in major and minor. That's the first thing that happens in the symphony: a brass fanfare in B flat minor, followed by a choir passage in the same key. While the choir sings the verses "Behold, the ...", the full orchestra starts at the word "sea" and breaks up the musical development in D major. The second motif is a melodic figure that is played through the entire first movement to the text “And, on its limitless heaving breast ...”. If you want to describe these musical relationships in the usual way of counting the individual rhythms, you could describe the pattern as "1 2 + 3-2-3 4", which indicates that the second bar is divided into eighth notes (with the words " on its ") and the third bar is divided into triplets (with the word" limitless ").

Reception and succession

The public impact of the Sea Symphony has not only left clear traces in the life of the composer, who had presented such a demanding and extensive work with his Opus 1, but it has at the same time endured English symphonic music of the 20th century and English music in general brought worldwide attention. Hugh Ottaway writes in his book Vaughan Williams Symphonies :

“The English symphony is almost entirely a 20th century creation. When Vaughan Williams began composing songs for choir and orchestra in 1903, which later became the 'Sea Symphony', Elgar had not yet shown himself to be a symphonist. And oddly enough, Elgar's first symphony of 1908 became the first ever symphony by an English composer to be included in the repertoire ... And when Vaughan Williams finished his Ninth Symphony in 1958, a few months before his death at the age of 85, the English symphony was the genre become a topic in its own right. And it is very evident that Vaughan Williams played a crucial role in this process. During this whole period he was constantly integrated and active in the musical life of the country, not only as a composer, but also as a teacher, conductor, organizer and increasingly as a tutor for young people. "

In another Grove article , Ottaway and Frogley wrote of Vaughan Williams' music that it was "... a triumph of instinct over the environment. The keynote is optimistic. Whitman's enthusiasm for the oneness of being and the brotherhood of men is clearly evident, and the vitality of the best in them has been shown to endure. Whatever the commitment to Parry and Stanford, and in the end also to Elgar, may mean, there is no doubt about the purely physical exhilaration or visionary enthusiasm ... ”(in: Vaughan Williams' music ).

Ursula Vaughan Williams, his widow, wrote a detailed biography of her husband and there she describes the key points of his philosophy:

“... he was aware of the collective hopes of the generations of men and women of his time, with whom he felt deeply connected. And that is why there is a fundamental tension in his work between traditional concepts of belief and morality and a modern, spiritual torment of the soul that is also visionary. "

literature

  • James Day: Vaughan Williams. 1961; 3rd edition, Oxford University Press, New York 1998.
  • AE Dickinson: Vaughan Williams. Faber and Faber, London 1963. Reprinted by Scholarly Press, Inc. St. Clair Shores, MI.
  • Hubert Foss: Ralph Vaughan Williams. Oxford University Press, New York 1950.
  • Alain Frogley (Ed.): Vaughan Williams Studies. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1996.
  • Michael Kennedy: The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Oxford University Press, London 1964.
  • Hugh Ottaway: Vaughan Williams Symphonies. University of Washington Press, Seattle 1972.
  • Hugh Ottaway and Alain Frogley: Vaughan Williams, Ralph. Grove Music Online. ed. L. Macy.
  • Elliot S. Schwartz: The Symphonies of Ralph Vaughan Williams. The University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst 1964.
  • Ursula Vaughan Williams: A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Oxford University Press, London 1964.
  • Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass. (“Deathbed edition” 1891-92). JM Dent, London 1993.

further reading

  • FRC Clark: The Structure of Vaughan Williams' 'Sea' Symphony. In: The Music Review . Volume 34, No. 1, February 1973, pp. 58-61.
  • Simon Heffer: Vaughan Williams . Northeastern University Press, Boston 2000.
  • Frank Howes: The Music of Vaughan Williams . Oxford University Press, London 1954.
  • Wilfrid Mellers: Vaughan Williams and the Vision of Albion . Barrie & Jenkins, London 1989. Especially Chapter 1, The Parlor and the Open Sea: Conformity and Nonconformity in Toward the Unknown Region and A Sea Symphony.
  • Ursula Vaughan Williams, Imogen Holst (Ed.): Heirs and Rebels: Letters written to each other and occasional writings on music by Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst. Oxford University Press, London 1959.

Recordings

  • Adrian Boult , conductor; Isobel Baillie, soprano; John Cameron, baritone; with the London Philharmonic Choir; London Philharmonic. Decca, p1953
  • Robert Spano, conductor; Christine Goerke, soprano; Brett Polegato, baritone; Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. Telarc, p2002. (Winner of the Grammy Award for Best Classical Album 2003)
  • Vernon Handley , conductor; Joan Rodgers, soprano; William Schimmel, baritone; Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and Choir. EMI, p1988
  • Bernard Haitink , conductor; Felicity Lott, soprano; Jonathan Summers, baritone; with the London Philharmonic Choir; Cantilena; London Philharmonic. EMI, p1989
  • Leonard Slatkin , conductor; Benita Valente, soprano; Thomas Allen , baritone; Philharmonia Chorus; London Philharmonic Orchestra . 1993