Music and Letters

Two years away from the fiftieth anniversary of his death, Vaughan Williams still lacks the degree of scholarly attention one might expect of a figure who won such renown at the peak of his career. To a certain extent he is the victim of fashion, an institutional climate favouring international modernism ignorantly consigning him to the role of quaint bumbling nationalist long before the appearance of his final works. However, with the turn to a more pluralistic outlook, the last twenty years have seen an increasing assertion of the value of his music. The attempt to redress the critical balance has been spearheaded in print by Alain Frogley (the edited Vaughan Williams Studies (Cambridge, 1996); Vaughan Williams's Ninth Symphony (Oxford, 2001)), Lewis Foreman (the edited Ralph Vaughan Williams in Perspective (London, 1998)), and the first Carthusian Trust Ralph Vaughan Williams Research [End Page 542] Fellow, Byron Adams (Vaughan Williams Essays, co-edited with Robin Wells (Aldershot, 2003)). A variety of approaches is to be found in these volumes: contextual studies of various kinds, manuscript studies, and various types of analysis. Now to be added to a bibliography that one hopes will continue to burgeon is Lionel Pike's book, which, while focusing on just one genre, is the first single-author attempt at studying a range of Vaughan Williams's work since Wilfrid Mellers's eccentric Vaughan Williams and the Vision of Albion (London, 1989). It can be debated to what extent the symphonies are representative of Vaughan Williams's output as a whole and of the various stages of his career in which they were written, but the general consensus seems to be that they contain much of his best music. So a book written at this stage should represent a good opportunity to take stock, aim for a balanced critical view, and go on to probe for a more nuanced overview of a body of work whose achievements have often been simultaneously under- and overrated.

It is not, though, an opportunity that Pike manages to seize with outright success. He focuses exclusively on the symphonies themselves with little attempt at placing them within the context of Vaughan Williams's output as a whole. Each symphony is given a chapter to itself, and while the chronologically surrounding non-symphonic works are mentioned at the beginning of chapters, this is insufficient to form an assessment of the role and significance of the symphonies, and of the ways in which they might collectively be distinctive. Neither does Pike attempt to relate Vaughan Williams's symphonic achievements to those of others: Sibelius is mentioned briefly in connection with Symphony no. 5; Elgar is referred to here and there as a predecessor; Nielsen's 'progressive tonality' is noted; and Shostakovich, Walton, and Robert Simpson all pop up in passing. But we gain little idea of where Vaughan Williams might be situated in this pantheon—which is odd, given Pike's belief that his later music, in particular, is misunderstood and undervalued. He might argue that his analysis of the internal relationships in the works is sufficient to establish Vaughan Williams's credentials, but the broad readership he seems to be envisaging—at various points he feels the need to offer basic descriptions of sonata form (on pp. 20-1, where it is described as 'one of the greatest inventions of the human mind', and p. 205), fugue (p. 21), and hemiola (p. 67)—is more likely to be engaged by a comparative context.

Pike's commentaries consist of chronological investigations of the scores. I applaud his pursuit of 'close reading', but even specialist readers would be more certain of their ability to stick to the task if he had managed to vary the level of detail a little more. He provides summaries at the end of some passages, but it is frequently difficult to see how the detail fits into an overall picture. The experience can be like staring at one of those Magic Eye pictures that were so popular in the 1980s...