Symphony No. 6 (Vaughan Williams)

Vaughan Williams's previous symphony, the Fifth, first heard in 1943, is a largely serene work, taken by many to be a valediction by the septuagenarian composer, but during 1944 he began to contemplate a new symphony. The inspiration for the work is not known. The conductor Malcolm Sargent, who toured the work internationally in the years immediately after the premiere, believed the composition had been prompted by the death of the bandleader Ken "Snakehips" Johnson and many others when the Café de Paris was bombed in the London Blitz. The composer's widow and biographer, Ursula Vaughan Williams, wrote, "rightly or wrongly, he never allowed the idea that lay behind the last movement of this symphony to be known to the critics who speculated on its historical and philosophical origin". The first performance of the Sixth Symphony was given by Sir Adrian Boult and the BBC Symphony Orchestra at a Royal Philharmonic Society concert in the Royal Albert Hall on 21 April 1948, broadcast live on the BBC Home Service. The work was an immediate success. In the words of the musical scholar Michael Kennedy, "The Sixth Symphony caused a sensation and was performed over 100 times in two years. Nothing like that had occurred in English music since Elgar's First Symphony in 1908". Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra gave the American premiere in August 1948; Bernard Heinze conducted the first performance in Australia in October 1948. In January 1949 Boult conducted the Italian premiere, with the Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, and Leopold Stokowski introduced the work to New York. Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt conducted the German premiere the following month. Boult conducted the Orchestre national de la RTF in the French premiere in Paris in January 1950. ==Conjectured programme==

After a notice in The Times called the Sixth "The war symphony", Vaughan Williams wrote to Frank Howes, the paper's chief music critic, "I dislike that implied connection very much". To his musical assistant Roy Douglas he complained, "It never seems to occur to people that a man might just want to write a piece of music". Nevertheless, there were those who thought the violent and jazzy scherzo was inspired by the bombing of the Café de Paris or that the pianissimo epilogue depicted a world laid waste by atomic warfare. Ursula Vaughan Williams wrote: Vaughan Williams later hinted at a possible vague inner programme for the symphony in a letter written in January 1956 to Kennedy: "With regard to the last movement of my No. 6, I do NOT BELIEVE IN meanings and mottoes, as you know, but I think we can get in words nearest to the substance of my last movement in 'We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep'". Kennedy later wrote that although the composer's own programme note is objectively analytical and "it is possible to hear the work as an investigation of tonic and dominant relationships and of counterpointing basic types of rhythms", nonetheless, "one cannot escape the impression that some kind of extra-musical drama or struggle is being described". ==Reception==

The press reaction was extremely positive. The Times commented on "The music's vigour and power, coming from a man of seventy-five", but it was the mysterious finale that attracted most attention. Richard Capell, in The Daily Telegraph, described the premiere as "a profoundly memorable event", and said that the composer, "true to the spirit of his whole career", had done the unpredictable thing: After the American premiere, Olin Downes wrote in The New York Times Stokowski wrote in the programme note for the first New York performance: The critic and musical scholar Deryck Cooke wrote that the effect on him of the premiere was "nothing short of cataclysmic": Cooke added that the symphony, as a work of art, more than deserved the overwhelming applause it got, but he wrote "I was no more able to applaud than at the end of Tchaikovsky's Pathétique Symphony – less so, in fact, for this seemed to be an ultimate nihilism beyond Tchaikovsky's conceiving: every drop of blood seemed frozen in one's veins". ==Music==

A typical performance takes about 35 minutes. The work is scored for a large orchestra including: 2 flutes, piccolo (doubling 3rd flute), 2 oboes, cor anglais, 2 clarinets in B, tenor saxophone (doubling bass clarinet in B), 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns in F, 3 trumpets in B, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, side drum, triangle, bass drum, cymbals, xylophone, harp (optionally doubled), and strings. The symphony is dedicated to the composer's musical assistant Michael Mullinar. It is in four linked movements (i.e. one movement leads straight into the next, with no pause between them), and includes a number of ideas that return in various guises throughout the symphony, for example the use of simultaneous chords a half-step apart, or the short-short-long rhythmic figure. The four movements are: I. Allegro : { \new PianoStaff (~ \times 2/3 { aes8 g e) } \times 2/3 { aes->( g e) } | aes16-> } \new Staff \relative c'' { \clef bass \numericTimeSignature \time 4/4 \key e \minor r2 2~ | 8 } >> } The symphony begins very loudly with the full orchestra playing simultaneously in a clash of F minor and E minor. When the scherzo material recurs the composer inverts the fugue subject and eventually combines that form with the original version. With the final climax (the trio theme stated by full orchestra) the music almost collapses, leaving the bass clarinet holding the sustained note that links to the Finale. IV. Epilogue: Moderato : \relative c' { \clef treble \numericTimeSignature \time 4/4 \tempo "Moderato" 4 = 56 f8(\pp g aes b~ b[ c16 ees c8 b] | c16[ ees c8 b f] ) } This movement follows a vaguely fugal structure; the entire movement is marked pp, meaning played very softly (with the repeated instruction senza crescendo, no increase in the volume). Vaughan Williams himself, in his programme note, speaks of "drifting" and "whiffs of theme" in characterising the music. ==Recordings==

The first two recordings were initially released on 78 rpm discs. The first was made on 21 February 1949 by the Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York under Stokowski who had been a fellow organ student of Vaughan Williams at the Royal College of Music in the 1890s. The second was by Boult days later with the London Symphony Orchestra. Both used the original version of the third movement. The composer revised that movement in 1950; Boult immediately recorded it for His Master's Voice (HMV) and that new version was included in the subsequent LP releases. ==Notes, references and sources==

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