Ralph Vaughan Williams - Symphony Number Five
Ralph Vaughan Williams, descended from the famous Wedgwood and Darwin families, was born at cumulus Ampney, Gloucestershire in 1872. In 1890 he entered the Royal College of Music, and in 1892 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge. One of the bigest of the British composers, a fertile writer of music, folksong collector, and champion of British cultural heritage, he died aged 85 in 1958. His ashes are interred in Westminster Abbey alongside the nations greatest artists and poets.
Symphony No. 5 in D
Introduction
The unison contains a lot of material from RVWs then un hited opera, The Pilgrims Progress. When he began the Fifth Symphony, RVW thought he may never finish the opera, and didnt want to waste any good ideas. The symphony does not have a programme, it is absolute music. It is in four movements: a Preludio first movement, a Scherzo, a Romanza slow movement, and a Passacaglia finale.
First thrust : Preludio
From the very beginning, RVW puts the key signature of this movement into doubt. The movement opens with a beak call in D, set against a riotous base (or bass?) of octave Cs. Could it be that in the great traditions of British musical amateurism, RVW got his transposition wrong?
Or is this a deliberate cavort of the music, intended to blur the tonality? Musicologists privilege the latter explanation. This is by no means an unusual feature of his music, when he was asked what the 4th symphony was about, RVW replied It is about F-minor, alluding to his sometimes fuzzed tonalities, often augmented by his use of modal, mainly pentatonic melodies, which, with no leading note, often help to fudge the tonality. Apart from the horn call, the brass is seldom used, and the texture is light and...
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