Masterworks 2
Location: Morris Performing Arts Center (574) 235-9190

Ralph Vaughan Williams
Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis

Ralph Vaughan Williams was born in Down Ampney, Gloucestershire, England in 1872 and died in London in 1958. He composed this work in 1910 and revised the score in 1913 and 1919. Vaughan Williams led the first performance at the Gloucester Festival in 1910. The score calls for solo string quartet, a small string orchestra of nine players (double quartet plus bass) and a conventional string orchestra.

As a young composer Vaughan Williams felt himself to be without a clear compositional direction, and in this respect he mirrored the state of British music generally. For some two hundred years after the death of Purcell, the British were seemingly overwhelmed by the influx of German and Viennese music, starting with their adopted son Handel and continuing through Mendelssohn and those that followed. Later in life Vaughan Williams would become one of the originators and custodians of the new British musical idiom.

When Vaughan Williams was offered the task of editing a new edition of the English Hymnal, he accepted reluctantly. He feared the project would prevent him from pursuing original compositions, but as he later said, “I know now that two years of close association with some of the best (as well as some of the worst) tunes in the world was a better musical education than any amount of sonatas and fugues.” It was during this project that Vaughan Williams encountered nine melodies which Thomas Tallis had contributed to the 1567 English Psalter.

Tallis (c. 1505-1585) was one of the most distinguished composers of the Tudor period. His tenure at the English court spanned the reigns of several monarchs, and likewise spanned changes of the state religion from Protestant to Catholic and back to Protestant again; no doubt such religious flexibility improved one’s employment prospects at court!

The Fantasia is based upon the third of the Tallis tunes, a melody in the Phrygian church mode that sets the words “Why furmeth in sight: the Gentiles spite, in fury raging stout.” Vaughan Williams calls for an orchestra of strings divided into three groups: a quartet of soloists, a massed string orchestra, and a smaller orchestra of nine players. In true Renaissance tradition the groups are to be separated in the performance space if possible.

As the title implies, the Fantasia is a free-form work in which the theme undergoes metamorphosis in a continuous flow, as distinguished from a strict theme and variations. The ancient melody (heard first in the low strings) is used as a whole and in fragments and is set off by Vaughan Williams’ own innovative melodic contributions. Harmonies range from those dating from the time of the original theme to those of the most modern sort. As a result, you’re never quite sure whether you are listening to old music or new, or to some alloy of the two. In this curious mixture Vaughan Williams can be heard developing his own musical voice while producing a work that is in the truest sense of the word, “timeless.”

Bohuslav Martinu
Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra

Bohuslav Martinu was born in Policka, Bohemia in 1890 and died in Liestal, Switzerland in 1959. He composed this concerto in 1931 and it was first performed the following year by the Pro Arte Quartet and the London Philharmonic under the direction of Malcom Sargent. The score calls for solo string quartet, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, timpani, percussion, and strings.

With a catalog of over 400 works, Martinů was one of the most prolific composers of the last century. Many of these remain unpublished, but the incredible diversity and versatility of what we have is his hallmark. He composed in nearly every genre and style imaginable, including symphonies, concertos, ballet, opera, chamber music, music for voice and music for piano. Much of this music is what we would call neoclassical, with clear textures, bracing harmonies, and rhythmic vitality.

Born in the Bohemian village of Polička, Martinů spent much of his childhood in a church tower, where his father was a fire warden. He attended the Prague Conservatory and played violin in the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. Seeking to escape “the cult of Smetana,” he later studied with Roussel in Paris, then came to the U.S. as World War II began. For the rest of his career he divided his time between Europe and North America, including an eight year stint on the faculty of the Mannes College of Music in New York City.

Born in the Bohemian village of Polička, Martinů spent much of his childhood in a church tower, where his father was a fire warden. He attended the Prague Conservatory and played violin in the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. Seeking to escape “the cult of Smetana,” he later studied with Roussel in Paris, then came to the U.S. as World War II began. For the rest of his career he divided his time between Europe and North America, including an eight year stint on the faculty of the Mannes College of Music in New York City.

In 1931 Martinů happened to meet the members of the Pro Arte String Quartet in a café after a concert they gave in Paris. They asked Martinů to compose a work for them and he immediately thought of a concerto grosso, a kind of concerto with multiple soloists popular in the Baroque era: “To tell the truth, I’m a concerto grosso type. In almost any textbook you can find a description of this form, but one that is only superficial except for the fact that the solo instruments alternate with the orchestra. In reality, everything goes deeper. Where symphonic form allows and actually demands use of emotional elements, where dynamic climaxes and catharses are obligatory, where you can stretch out your themes to endless dimensions at the expense of organic order, the concerto grosso form allows you strict order, constraint, balancing of the emotional elements, limitation of balance and dynamics, and a completely different and strict structure of thematic arrangement—in short, a completely different world.”

The concerto is all of this, sometimes astringent but always lyrical. The solo quartet is used as a unit throughout the Allegro vivo, a movement that gives the impression of continual variation. The Adagio is elegiac and likewise free in form, with the quartet used both as a unit and as individuals. The Finale is playful, something like a polka by way of a Mozart rondo, all composed with twentieth-century sensibilities.

Robert Schumann
Symphony No. 2 in C Major, Op. 61

Robert Schumann was born in Zwickau, Germany in 1810 and died at Endenich, Germany in 1856. He completed this symphony in 1846, and it was first performed by the Gewandhaus Orchestra under the baton of Felix Mendelssohn the same year. The score calls for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, and strings.

By the time Schumann composed his Symphony No. 2 (it was actually the third one he wrote), he had suffered many of his nervous breakdowns, episodes full of memory lapses, phobias, and suicidal fantasies. He composed the work during his convalescence following the most recent of these. He sketched the work very quickly, but took quite a long time to finish it. He may have seen it as a way to pull himself out of his melancholia, a kind of musical struggle to regain himself. “I began to feel more myself when I wrote the last movement,” he wrote, “and was certainly much better when I finished the whole work. All the same, it reminds me of dark days.”

The dichotomy between Schumann’s personal demons and the strong, lively, and vigorous music he composed in his Second Symphony is as great as can be imagined. The slow (and quite lengthy) introduction to the first movement begins with a quiet call to attention in the trumpets. Thereafter it ranges far and wide, never visiting a theme or tonal center long enough to call it home. The Allegro that follows is full of off-kilter rhythms—it is very Brahmsian in this way—and relentlessly vigorous. The exposition is surprisingly short, while the development is quite extended. The similarly expansive coda reprises the introduction’s trumpet call.

The second movement is a scherzo with two trios, opening with a famously scurrying string figure. (Famous among violinists, at least, whose duty is to work through its difficulties.) Those with an ear for such things might notice in the second trio a cleverly embedded motto on Bach’s initials (B-A-C-H, or B-flat, A, C, B-natural in German parlance). Schumann had been studying Bach, which accounts for both this and the increased level of polyphony in the symphony as a whol

The third movement’s song-like Adagio is calm, poignant, and melancholic. Schumann seems to begin a fugue, of all things, in the middle of the movement, but drops it before it takes hold. A true symphonic adagio was fairly rare for Schumann; this one swells with affecting beauty.

The Finale is an exuberant finish to the whole. Its shape is unusual; Schumann seldom wrote music to fit a form, he created a form to suit the music. A variation of the Adagio’s theme gets prominent treatment, and the fanfare that opened the first movement returns at the close. The energy and sense of “rightness” in this piece conceal a treasure-trove of compositional details that are far too numerous to mention but which contribute mightily to both

After a disastrous first performance under the baton of Felix Mendelssohn (disastrous largely due to the excessive length of the program—the audience simply had no energy left for it), Schumann’s Second was almost universally considered to be a great work in the nineteenth century. In modern times it has been neglected, sadly, for no reason that is apparent. It holds many beauties, and repays repeated listening. It also provokes a certain fascination in how a man who could slip so easily between madness and sanity could also have written something as lucid as this.