The Symphony No. 9 in E minor was the last symphony written by the British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. He composed it from 1956 to 1957 and it was given its premiere performance in London by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Malcolm Sargent on 2 April 1958, in the composer's eighty-sixth year. It was subsequently performed on 5 August 1958 by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Malcolm Sargent at a Promenade Concert. Vaughan Williams died three weeks later, on 26 August, the very day on which the symphony was due to be recorded for the first time, by the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir Adrian Boult. The composer had planned to attend the recording sessions.
Contents
Vaughan Williams's original idea was to create a programmatic symphony based on Thomas Hardy's book Tess of the d'Urbervilles, even though the programmatic elements eventually disappeared as work on the composition progressed. Existing sketches clearly indicate that, in the early stages of composition, certain passages related to specific people and events in the novel: in some of the manuscripts, the first movement is headed "Wessex Prelude", and the heading "Tess" appears above sketches for the second movement.
The work is in four movements
- Moderato maestoso
- Andante sostenuto
- Scherzo: Allegro pesante
- Finale: Andante tranquillo
It is worth noting that the opening theme of the slow movement comes from music Vaughan Williams had composed more than fifty years earlier: A Sea Symphony and an even earlier, unpublished tone poem from 1904 called The Solent. The composer himself called the drumbeat music that immediately follows this theme, “the ghostly drummer of Salisbury Plain.”
Instrumentation
The orchestra includes:
Vaughan Williams's program note accompanying the premiere performance remarked thus:
The usual symphony orchestra is used with the addition of three saxophones and flugelhorn. This beautiful and neglected instrument is not usually allowed in the select circles of the orchestra and has been banished to the brass band, where it is allowed to indulge in the art of vibrato. While in the orchestra it is obliged to play with a pure and unwavering tone. The saxophones, also, are not expected, except possibly in one place in the scherzo, to behave like demented cats, but are allowed to be their own romantic selves. Otherwise the orchestra is normal, and is, the composer hopes, sound in wind and strings.
Very early on in the first movement the three saxophones play a chorale-like passage in chordal harmony, perhaps to emphasise that this will not be the sort of dance band music which the saxophone produces in the scherzo of his Sixth Symphony.
Critical reception
According to Vaughan Williams biographer Michael Kennedy, at its first performances "there was no denying the coolness of the critics' reception of the music. Its enigmatic mood puzzled them, and more attention was therefore paid to the use of the flugel horn and to the flippant programme note." Critic Murray Shafer remarked that the work is notable only "because of [Vaughan Williams's] reputation as a symphonist, and because the composition of the 9th shortly before his death prolongs a certain well-known legend" and "[found] it difficult...to discover much more than a numerical value in the work." He went on to complain about the saxophones and flugelhorn that "all this extra color seems to be employed simply in thickening the middle-orchestra texture, the one area of the orchestra which does not need extra support." Unenthusiastic early reaction, along with the unusual instrumental requirements, may have kept the symphony from having the kind of sustained performance history that most of the others have enjoyed. The flugelhorn player at the premiere was David Mason, who remarked that all the press coverage was about the flugelhorn, to the detriment of serious discussion of the symphony as a work.
The critical reception given to the US premiere of the work under Leopold Stokowski in Carnegie Hall on 25 September 1958 was more favourable. In the New York Times, Harold C. Schoenberg wrote that "the symphony is packed with strong personal melody from beginning to end ... A mellow glow suffuses the work, as it does the work of many veteran composers who seem to gaze retrospectively over their careers ... In any case, the Ninth Symphony is a masterpiece." In the Musical Courier, G. Waldrop described it as "a work of beauty ... lyricism, sheer tonal beauty and thorough craftsmanship were in evidence throughout."
The differences in the initial critical reactions to the music may have been partly due to the performances. In his 1987 biography of Sir Adrian Boult, Michael Kennedy referred to Sargent's as having been "an unsatisfactory first performance." Percy Grainger, however, who was in Carnegie Hall for the US premiere, told Ursula Vaughan Williams that Stokowski's performance "seemed a perfect one in every way and the exquisite beauty and cosmic quality of this immortal work struck me as being ideally realised." (Both performances have been issued on CD: Sargent's by Pristine Audio and Stokowski's by Cala Records.) Sargent's world-premiere performance is also available as free download/FLAC from The Music Parlour (linked below).
Alain Frogley considers Vaughan Williams's last symphony to be one of his greatest works. Hugh Ottaway and Alain Frogley call this symphony "the most impressive achievement" of Vaughan Williams's final decade and remark that "both outer movements employ highly original structures – the carefully graded and layered engineering of rhythmic momentum in the first movement is especially striking – and the work offers one of Vaughan Williams's most impressive essays in finely balanced tonal and modal ambiguities."