Early orchestral works of Vaughan Williams recovered.

Kuykendall, James Brooks

Ralph Vaughan Williams. Bucolic Suite. Study score. Edited by Julian Rushton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. [Pref., p. iv-v; source, p. vi; textual notes, p. vii-ix; orchestration, p. [x]; score, p. 1-133. ISBN 978-0-19-337955-8. 20.95[pounds sterling].]

Ralph Vaughan Williams. Serenade in A Minor (1898). Study score. Edited by Julian Rushton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. [Pref., p. iv-v; source, p. vi; textual notes, p. vii-viii; orchestration, p. [x]; score, p. 1-132. ISBN 978-0-19-337956-5. 20.95[pounds sterling].]

Ralph Vaughan Williams. Fantasia for Piano and Orchestra. Study score. Edited by Graham Parlett. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. [Pref., p. iv; manuscript, p. v; editorial method, p. v; textual notes, p. vi-vii; orchestration, p. [viii]; score, p. 1-87. ISBN 978-0-19-338825-3. 15.50[pounds sterling].]

Ralph Vaughan Williams. Burley Heath. Study score. Edited by James Francis Brown. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. [Pref., p. v; manuscript and textual notes, p. vii; orchestration, p. [viii]; score, p. 1--32. ISBN 978-0-19-339939-6. 7.95[pounds sterling].]

Ralph Vaughan Williams. Harnham Down. Study score. Edited by James Francis Brown. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. [Pref., p. v-vi; manuscript and textual notes, p. vii; orchestration, p. [viii]; score, p. 1-19. ISBN 978-0-19-339940-2. 6.95[pounds sterling].]

Ralph Vaughan Williams. The Solent. Study score. Edited by James Francis Brown. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. [Pref., p. v-vi; textual notes, p. vii; score, p. 1-33. ISBN 978-0-19-339941-9. 7.95[pounds sterling].]

Despite an increasing presence in both performance and scholarly domains, it seems unlikely that Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) will be honored with a uniform and complete critical edition any time soon. Unlike his younger colleague William Walton, whose monogamous relationship with a publisher--Oxford University Press--combined with a fairly short work-list and unusually neat handwriting made the completion of the William Walton Edition manageable in less than twenty years, Vaughan Williams's spidery script and sprawling oeuvre spread across several publishers' catalogs (principally Stainer & Bell, Oxford, and Curwen, with works in varying states of international copyright protection) pose practical challenges to the production of a complete edition. In recent years, Oxford has been steadily churning out new critical editions of a varied selection of Vaughan Williams works in its catalog--including Symphonies 5, 6, and 7, as well as lesser works (e.g., the Tuba Concerto, and Flos Campi). This worthy initiative has been the beneficiary of the Vaughan Williams Charitable Trust. The six works reviewed here (all dating between 1895 and 1907) are products of the same initiative, but have remained hitherto unpublished. Although in 1903 he could regard these as among his "most important works" (see letter 31 in Letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams 1895-1958, ed. Hugh Cobbe [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008], 44), all were subsequently withdrawn by the composer. Indeed, "scrapped" was the word Vaughan Williams generally used for them, but he did not completely discard them. Each of these works survives only in an autograph full score. (The autograph of the Serenade is held by Yale University; those of the other five works are preserved at the British Library.) With but a single source, these editions are straightforward: some regularization of articulations and dynamics, a number of dubious notes emended, and an occasional creative rethinking of the original notation, but there are no challenging textual variants to be reconciled. Harnham Down seems to have required the least intervention ("Very little editorial clarification was necessary since expression marks and dynamics were consistent," p. vii); Burley Heath--breaking off at m. 173 in the surviving source--required the conjectural addition of twenty-six measures (adapted slightly from earlier in the work) to provide a convincing conclusion.

So what do these works offer? Collectively they yield a more nuanced view of Vaughan Williams as orchestral composer. They might be regarded as the scaffolding that enabled him to reach the level of the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910), The Lark Ascending (1914), and the first three symphonies (1903-9; 1911-13; 1916-21)--and, indeed, that equipped others similarly engaged on the quest for distinctly English orchestral character pieces. Burley Heath, Harnham Down, and The Solent are as cousins to Gustav Hoist's Two Songs without Words (1906) and George Butterworth's three English Idylls (1910-13), and in some particulars betray a close family resemblance (particularly in the prominence of the solo clarinet and the intricate divisi string textures).

All of the works reviewed here predate Vaughan Williams's study with Maurice Ravel, and demonstrate a conservative approach to orchestration. The influence of Vaughan Williams's prior teachers Hubert Parry, Charles Villiers Stanford, and Max Bruch are very much in evidence here. Adam Carse wrote of Bruch's music that it "typifies the sound, unoffending, conventional Teutonic orchestration of the period; orchestration which took no risks, which is not quite so heavy and unbending as that of Brahms, yet which lacks enterprise, lightness and vigor" (Carse, The History of Orchestration [London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1925; reprint, New York: Dover, 1964], 297); this description applies well to much of the scoring here. Perhaps significantly, Harnham Down, the latest of the works, has the most inventive orchestration: the trio of solo violas which ends the piece is a particularly striking idea.

For these works Vaughan Williams expected a very large string section (with up to eight desks apiece for first and second violins), but he requires only pairs of woodwinds and trumpets, with at most four horns, three trombones, tuba, percussion, and harp. The triple-wind French-style orchestra (and appropriated by Wagner as the German romantic orchestra) was not the default symphony orchestra even in London. Vaughan Williams's first three symphonies--completed after his study with Ravel--are each conceived for the larger triple-wind ensemble, but even then Vaughan Williams felt constrained to publish them in cued versions that allowed for performances by the smaller orchestras that were still the norm. Not until his Sixth Symphony (1948) did he publish a symphonic work for large orchestra that he did not adapt for a smaller ensemble.

The 1898 Serenade in A Minor is a fascinating work, as it could be read as Vaughan Williams's tentative first step down the wrong path--that is, a well-trodden path of British symphonies in the MendelssohnSchumann-Brahms trajectory, such as those of Parry and Stanford. If so, the "serenade" label is not merely a disguise for a symphony by another name; rather, it freed Vaughan Williams to explore symphonic strategies other than sonata form. Even so, the decision of what to include in it seems to have caused him some trouble, as did even the order of the five movements. As completed, the penultimate movement ("Romance") is strikingly original. By far the longest movement in performance, it begins with a slow, lyrical melody featuring clarinet, horn, and strings; the second section begins with a birdcall-like unaccompanied oboe phrase in alternation with a new lyrical melody in the strings; the birdcall gradually permeates the full orchestral texture, including the bass instruments, and eventually the first melody returns in counterpoint with the birdcall figure. This resembles Hoist's later "Country Song," the first of his Two Songs without Words already mentioned, but no other parallel presents itself. In performance, the Serenade might make an interesting companion piece to Beethoven's "Pastoral" Symphony, not as much because of the unexpected prominence of birdcall, but rather for the unconventional reworking of a genre (and indeed in five movements), and the very similar scoring.

The Serenade seems to be the best work of the group; whether the rest of these can sustain themselves in repertory lists or even on the shelves of music stores is doubtful. The composer had his doubts even early on, trying to group some of the shorter works into something larger--although what, exactly, is not quite clear. The manuscripts of Burley Heath, The Solent, and Harnham Down in the British Library are bound together (Add. MS 57278), and the undated title page preceding Burley Heath indicates that it was at some point considered the first movement of In the Nexo Forest: Four Impressions for Orchestra; the list of instruments on the verso indicates which instruments play in each of the four movements. The Solent does not quite fit any of these. Harnham Down (albeit a later work--but later than the title page?) might have served as the second movement. Then again, Harnham Down was performed as part of Two Impressions for Orchestra in 1907, together with Boldre Wood, now lost. Were all four ever intended to cohere together? Have other works vanished without trace, even in the surviving correspondence? (And were the works that were actually destroyed deemed too close to later works that reused some of their musical material? If so, The Solent is a lucky survivor, as thematic material reappears in the Sea Symphony and Symphony no. 9, as well as in the music for the 1956 film The England of Elizabeth.) Vaughan Williams's idea of combining his three Norfolk Rhapsodies into a "Norfolk" Symphony never came to fruition, as he scrapped nos. 2 and 3. The last of these is no longer extant, but no. 2 exists in the autograph manuscript (lacking two pages), and is forthcoming from Oxford in this series of glimpses of early Vaughan Williams.

Oxford does not have the monopoly on publishing the unknown Vaughan Williams: recently Stainer & Bell brought out the choral-orchestral mass setting that Vaughan Williams wrote for his Cambridge doctorate (A Cambridge Mass for SATB soloists, double chorus and orchestra, ed. Alan Tongue [London: Stainer & Bell, 2012]), as well as the contemporaneous cantata The Garden of Proserpine (vocal score [London: Stainer & Bell, 2011]); and Faber Music has published the orchestral Heroic Elegy and Triumphal Epilogue of 1901 (London: Faber Music, 2008). Each of the works has been performed, and the six works reviewed here have each been recorded. No doubt there will be a flurry of performances of at least some of this repertoire in the 2022 sesquicentennial of the composer's birth. Even for a composer as generally popular as Vaughan Williams, however, these works seem unlikely to become widely known. The works are nonetheless significant, not only for what they reveal about Vaughan Williams, but more especially about the musical culture in which he was striving to make a name for himself. Moreoever, it is fascinating to discover that Harnham Down moved the fifteen-year-old Gerald Finzi so greatly when he heard it in performance in 1916 that it could serve as a direct (and documented) influence on his own Intimations of Immortality some twenty years later.

The piano Fantasia is the weakest of the six works. Apparently never receiving a performance during the composer's lifetime, the manuscript reveals that it caused him the most trouble in composition (1896-1902) and revision (1904). The editor, Graham Parlett, reports an astonishing array of cancelled pages and revisions, but even so some passages have required further intervention. Some of these are puzzling--regularizing quarter-notes to eighth-notes in one place (m. 50) and the reverse in another (m. 75), in both instances "as in surrounding bars" (p. vi), although in the first instance the texture is different enough to argue that the quarter-note was intentional. At these and other times, one wonders whether in the quest for regularity something "characteristic" (a term Vaughan Williams recalled from his early instruction under Hubert Parry) has been eliminated.

These works would have benefited from publication in a single volume--an anthology of the early orchestral works, with a single comprehensive discussion of their context, together with a consideration of the musicological literature on these works. Not one of the prefaces to these scores cites the most detailed consideration of these works to date (Michael Vaillancourt, "Coming of Age: The Earliest Orchestral Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams," in Vaughan Williams Studies, ed. Alain Frogley [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 23-46). While that article and the more recent treatment by Alain Frogley ("History and Geography: The Early Orchestral Works and the First Three Symphonies," in The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams, ed. Alain Frogley and Aidan J. Thompson [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013], 81-105) together go some way in providing the necessary context, the editing of each of these works might well have been different with the larger context in mind. In particular there is inconsistency between what makes it into the score and what goes in the textual notes. At the beginning of The Solent, the division of the violins (each section divided into two groups of four desks 1.3.5.7/2.4.6.8) is included in the score as if it were the composer's instruction, although the notes indicate that this is a blue pencil marking; earlier, the editor, James Francis Brown, remarks that the blue pencil markings "are supposed by Michael Kennedy to be in the hand of Sir Henry Wood" (without citation, but apparently referring to a comment in Michael Kennedy, A Catalogue of the Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, 2d ed. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996], 20), but without considering the question further. This speculative connection to Wood is unsatisfying. Without further evidence, the marks might just as well be those of Dan Godfrey, who is known to have conducted a number of these works with his Bournemouth Municipal Orchestra. As the Solent--the narrow strait between Great Britain and the Isle of Wight--was was just a few miles east of Bournemouth, one would think Vaughan Williams's The Solent would have been of particular interest to Godfrey. Might he have been involved in the mysterious June 1903 (private?) performance? The reader is left to wonder, but an edition embracing all of these works would have been in a better position to consider such questions. Similarly, although Brown edited the three shorter works, there is little effort to confront the difficult questions concerning what the composer's larger project was, and how that idea mutated over time; there is, indeed, no detailed information on the relationship of the title page of Burley Heath discussed above to the rest of the manuscript Add. MS 57278. And if Julian Rushton can take the editorial liberty to change the time signature in a single measure of the Bucolic Suite (fourth movement, m. 264), might this option have enabled Graham Parlett to explicate better the composer's curious triplet notation used to indicate a 3/2 hemiola within a prevailing 12/8 in the Fantasia (mm. 415-28)?

If these editions must exist as individual issues, it is a pity that each editor was not overseen by a single general editor to bring some consistency to the project. As it is, the six works are much more interesting in tandem than they are individually. As a set, they belong in any music research library. Scholars of Vaughan Williams's orchestral music and of the British orchestral scene should be aware of them, even if they do not acquire them for ready reference. Beyond this, it is difficult to recommend them more widely. Although these are generally good editions, one cannot help but think that the works they contain were scrapped for good reasons, and perhaps the composer knew best.

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JAMES BROOKS KUYKENDALL

Erskine College