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1910 limerick by Ralph Vaughan Williams

Curwen edition of the Tallis Fantasia orchestral score

Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis , also known equally the Tallis Fantasia , is a one-movement work for cord orchestra by Ralph Vaughan Williams. The theme is by the 16th-century English composer Thomas Tallis. The Fantasia was offset performed at Gloucester Cathedral as role of the 1910 3 Choirs Festival, and has entered the orchestral repertoire, with frequent concert performances and recordings by conductors and orchestras of various countries.

Background and first performance [edit]

Vaughan Williams did not achieve broad recognition early on in his career as a composer, merely past 1910, in his belatedly thirties, he was gaining a reputation.[ane] In that year the Three Choirs Festival commissioned a work from him, to exist premiered in Gloucester Cathedral; this represented a considerable boost to his continuing.[2] He composed what his biographer James Day calls "unquestionably the starting time piece of work by Vaughan Williams that is recognizably and unmistakably his and no i else's".[3] It is based on a tune by the 16th-century English composer Thomas Tallis, which Vaughan Williams had come across while editing the English Hymnal, published in 1906.[4] Vaughan Williams conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in the first performance of the Fantasia, as the first part of a concert in Gloucester Cathedral on 6 September 1910, followed by Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius, conducted by its composer.[5] [n 1]

Music [edit]

Theme [edit]

Commencement bars of Tallis's theme

Like several other of Vaughan Williams's works, the Fantasia draws on the music of the English Renaissance.[9] Tallis'south melody is in the Phrygian mode, characterised by intervals of a flat second, 3rd, sixth and seventh;[four] the pattern is reproduced by playing the white notes of the pianoforte starting on E.[10]

Parker'southward verse for which Tallis composed the tune used past Vaughan Williams

Tallis'southward theme was 1 of nine tunes he wrote for the Psalter of 1567 of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker. It was a setting of Parker's metrical version of Psalm ii, which in the King James Bible version begins, "Why exercise the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?", and is rendered by Parker as "Why fumeth in sight: The Gentils spite, In fury raging stout? Why taketh in hond: the people fond, Vayne things to bring about?".[due north 2] The melody is in Double Common Metre (D.C.M. or C.Chiliad.D.).[12]

Co-ordinate to his biographer Michael Kennedy, Vaughan Williams came to acquaintance Tallis's theme with John Bunyan's Christian allegory, The Pilgrim'south Progress, a subject with which the composer had a lifelong fascination; he used the tune in 1906 in incidental music he composed for a stage version of the book.[13] For the Hymnal, he adapted the tune as a setting of Joseph Addison's hymn "When ascent from the bed of death".[xiv] [due north 3]

Fantasia [edit]

The term "fantasia", according to Frank Howes in his study of Vaughan Williams'southward works, referred to the 16th-century forerunner of the fugue "in that a thread of theme was enunciated and taken up past other parts, and then dropped in favour of another akin to it which was similarly treated".[15] Vaughan Williams's fantasia draws on but does not strictly follow this precept, containing sections in which the material is interrelated, although with little wholly imitative writing, and antiphony in preference to contrapuntal echoing of themes.[xv]

The Fantasia is scored for double string orchestra with string quartet, employing antiphony between the 3 contributory ensembles. Orchestra I is the chief torso of strings; Orchestra II is smaller.[16] The published score does not stipulate the number of players in Orchestra I; Orchestra II consists of 2 commencement violins, 2 seconds, two violas, two cellos and one double bass[17] The composer'due south metronome marking indicates a playing time of 11½ minutes,[18] [n iv] but in recorded performances the duration has varied between 12m 40s (Dmitri Mitropoulos, 1958) and 18m 12s (Leonard Bernstein, 1976), with a more typical time of between 15 and 16½ minutes.[xviii] [23]

The piece begins in B-flat major in four
4 time, with all three groups playing together, ppp molto sostenuto.[24] Kennedy describes the opening every bit "the theme … beginning hinted at on pizzicato lower strings in a hauntingly poetic introduction before nosotros hear its first full statement in Tallis'south four-part harmonisation".[13] From the ninth bar the two orchestras together proceed into a 6
8 section, marked largamente.[25] Howes comments that "a phrase of swaying chords" subsequently the initial statement of the theme "acts as a kind of recurrent refrain" throughout the main body of the piece.[15] Afterwards eighteen bars the time signature changes to 3
four and the music rises to an appassionato climax earlier a half-dozen
8 section after which the two orchestras split up.[26] The music switches to C major, with the time signature (only not the pulse of the music) irresolute rapidly, and solo viola, first heard above the orchestras and so solo in a più animato passage. The other three members of the quartet join, followed by the two orchestras, at present playing different parts from each other, also piu animato. The music moves poco a poco animando to a crescendo to fortissimo. The quartet and orchestra one play together, contrasting with orchestra 2 in a 5
8 fortissimo passage.[27] After ii more changes of time signature there is a molto adagio section,[28] after which the music reverts to the original time and key. At that place is a sudden hush, and, in Howes's analysis, "by fashion of coda the solo violin soars [and] the piece of work ends on a chord of G major".[fifteen] Kennedy observes:

The spacious and sonorous use of spread chords, the imperial cadences and extreme range of dynamics, forth with the antiphony betwixt the two string bodies (playing alternately, the one answering the other, ofttimes like an repeat), the contrast with the string quartet, and the passages for solo violin and solo viola combine to create a luminous upshot.[13]

Vaughan Williams revised the work twice: outset in January 1913 (for the first London performance), and then over again in April 1919, making it more curtailed each time,[29] taking a total of virtually two minutes off the original 1910 playing fourth dimension.[30]

Reception [edit]

The premiere of the Fantasia received a generally warm welcome, with a few exceptions: Herbert Brewer, the Gloucester cathedral organist, described information technology as "a queer, mad work past an odd fellow from Chelsea".[31] The Musical Times reviewer said, "Information technology is a grave piece of work, exhibiting power and much charm of the contemplative kind, but it appears over long for the subject field-matter".[32] Other reviews were more enthusiastic. The reviewer in The Daily Telegraph praised Vaughan Williams'southward mastery of string issue and added that although the work might not appeal to some considering of its "seeming austerity", it was "extremely cute to such equally have ears for the best music of all ages".[33] In The Manchester Guardian, Samuel Langford wrote, "The melody is modal and antique in flavour, while the harmonies are as exotic as those of Debussy … The work marks out the composer as one who has got quite out of the ruts of the commonplace".[34] In The Times, J. A. Fuller Maitland also commented on ancient and Debussian echoes, and observed:

Throughout its course one is never quite certain whether one is listening to something very quondam or very new. … But that is only what makes this Fantasia and so delightful to listen to; information technology cannot exist assigned to a time or a school, but information technology is full of the visions which have haunted the seers of all times.[35]

In 1954 Howes wrote:

The work in its definitive course has the solidity and grandeur of a cathedral, to which its strains seem to belong by a natural affinity. It has passed into the repertory of all the neat orchestras of the world. Its intense Englishness has been no bar to international understanding, whatever may have been said forth those lines about other of Vaughan Williams's compositions.[xv]

Listeners of the British classical music radio station Classic FM have regularly voted the piece into the elevation five of the station's "Hall of Fame", an annual poll of the most pop classical music works.[36]

Recordings [edit]

Although the BBC first circulate the Fantasia in 1926, and again over the following decade, conducted by the composer and Arturo Toscanini,[37] it was not until 1936 that the work was recorded for the gramophone. The fledgling Decca company recorded it with Boyd Neel conducting his orchestra under the supervision of the composer in January 1936,[38] a set described by The Gramophone as 1 of the outstanding records of the year.[39] Since then at that place have been more than fifty recordings by orchestras and conductors from various countries.

Notes, references and sources [edit]

Notes [edit]

  1. ^ Frank Howes in his book about Vaughan Williams (1954) says that the work had 1 prior performance, conducted by Thomas Beecham in London in 1909, but this is patently an error. The Gloucester performance was the premiere, according to the published score,[6] and to studies of Vaughan Williams by Ursula Vaughan Williams, Ryan Ross, Alain Frogley and Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and contemporary newspapers recorded a Queen's Hall performance in Feb 1913 every bit the work's first performance in London.[7] [viii]
  2. ^ Musically, the same biblical passage is also familiar in Handel's Messiah: "Why practice the nations so furiously rage together, And why do the people imagine a vain thing?"[11]
  3. ^ The Hymnal notes that Horatius Bonar's hymn "I heard the Phonation of Jesus Say" and many other D.C.M. hymns may also exist sung to this melody.[12]
  4. ^ Vaughan Williams's metronome markings for this and other works have been chosen into question.[19] [20] He did not notice them himself when conducting his works, and was nowadays at recordings by Boyd Neel and Sir Adrian Boult where he did non object to slower tempi than marked.[21] His musical assistant Roy Douglas has suggested that Vaughan Williams simply miscalculated because he did not possess a metronome.[22]

References [edit]

  1. ^ Howes, pp. 86–87; and Ottaway, Hugh, and Alain Frogley. "Vaughan Williams, Ralph", Grove Music Online, Oxford University Printing, 2001. Retrieved 24 December 2020 (subscription required)
  2. ^ Ursula Vaughan Williams, p. 88
  3. ^ 24-hour interval, p. 25
  4. ^ a b Howes, p. 87
  5. ^ "Iii Choirs Festival", The Musical Standard, 3 September 1910, p. 143
  6. ^ Vaughan Williams, R. "Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis", Serenissima Music, 2011. Retrieved 24 December 2020
  7. ^ "Balfour Gardiner Concerts", Mantle Mall Gazette, x February 1913, p. 5 and "Latest News", The Scotsman, 12 February 1913, p. 9
  8. ^ Ursula Vaughan Williams, p. 88; Ross, p. 162; Frogley and Thomson, p. 82; and Shaw, Watkins, and John C. Phillips. "Three Choirs Festival", Grove Music Online, Oxford University Printing, 2001. Retrieved 24 December 2020 (subscription required)
  9. ^ Mellers, pp. 49–50
  10. ^ Foreman, Lewis (2019). Notes to Onyx CD 4212
  11. ^ "Messiah libretto", Handel Institut. Retrieved 24 December 2020
  12. ^ a b Dearmer and Vaughan Williams, p. 63
  13. ^ a b c Kennedy, Michael (2014). Notes to Hallé CD CDHLL 7540
  14. ^ Frogley and Thompson, p. 90
  15. ^ a b c d e Howes, p. 91
  16. ^ Howes, p. 90
  17. ^ Ralph Vaughan Williams, p. ii
  18. ^ a b Atlas (2011), p. 119
  19. ^ Adams, Byron. "The stages of revision of Vaughan Williams'due south Sixth Symphony", The Musical Quarterly, Fall 1989 (subscription required)
  20. ^ Atlas (2010), pp. 24–25
  21. ^ Culshaw, p. 121; Boult, Sir Adrian "Vaughan Williams and his Interpreters", The Musical Times, Oct 1972, pp. 957–958 (subscription required); and Notes to Somm CD SOMMCD 071 (2007) and Decca CD 00028947860464 (2013)
  22. ^ Douglas, p. 66
  23. ^ Notes to Parlophone 0724356724051 (Barbirolli); Parlophone 0077776401751 (Boult); Parlophone 0077774939454 (Haitink); Onxy ONYX4212 (Manze) and CDHLL7540 (Elderberry)
  24. ^ Ralph Vaughan Williams, p. iii
  25. ^ Ralph Vaughan Williams, p. iv
  26. ^ Ralph Vaughan Williams, pp. five–9
  27. ^ Ralph Vaughan Williams, pp. 9–17
  28. ^ Ralph Vaughan Williams, p. eighteen
  29. ^ Atlas (2011), p. 118
  30. ^ Atlas (2011), p. 141
  31. ^ Hurd, p. 24
  32. ^ "The Gloucester Festival", The Musical Times, 1 October 1910, p. 650
  33. ^ "Gloucester Festival", The Daily Telegraph, eight September 1910, p. 7
  34. ^ Langford, Samuel. "Gloucester Musical Festival", The Manchester Guardian, 7 September 1910, p. vi
  35. ^ "Music", The Times, 7 September 1910, p. 11
  36. ^ "Hall of Fame 2014 and "Hall of Fame 2020", Archetype FM. Retrieved 26 December 2020
  37. ^ "Vaughan Williams Fantasia Thomas Tallis", BBC Genome. Retrieved 24 Dec 2020
  38. ^ Stuart, Philip. Decca Classical, 1929–2009, AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music. Retrieved 5 September 2014
  39. ^ "Some records of the yr", The Gramophone, Dec 1936, p. 279

Sources [edit]

Books [edit]

  • Day, James (1972). Vaughan Williams. London: Dent. OCLC 462037518.
  • Dearmer, Percy; Ralph Vaughan Williams (1906). "Hymn 92 – When Rising from the Bed of Death". The English language Hymnal. Oxford: Oxford Academy Press. OCLC 10855613.
  • Frogley, Alain; Aidan J. Thomson (2013). The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN978-1-139-04324-3.
  • Culshaw, John (1981). Putting the Record Straight. London: Secker and Warburg. ISBN978-0-436-11802-ix.
  • Douglas, Roy (1988). Working with Vaughan Williams. London: The British Library. ISBN978-0-7123-0148-0.
  • Howes, Frank (1954). The Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press. OCLC 459433504.
  • Hurd, Michael (1978). The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney. Oxford: Oxford Academy Press. ISBN978-0-19-211752-half-dozen.
  • Mellers, Wilfrid (1989). The Double Man: Vaughan Williams and the Vision of Albion. London: Barrie & Jenkins. ISBN978-0-7126-2117-5.
  • Ross, Ryan (2016). Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Enquiry and Data Guide. New York and London: Routledge. ISBN978-i-138-79271-5.
  • Vaughan Williams, Ralph (1921). Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis. London and New York: Boosey & Hawkes. OCLC 663881436.
  • Vaughan Williams, Ursula (1964). RVW: A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0-19-315411-vii.

Journals [edit]

  • Atlas, Allan (2010). "On the Construction and Proportions of Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis". Journal of the Royal Musical Association. 135 (1): 115–144. doi:10.1080/02690401003597797. JSTOR 43741608. S2CID 191641106. (subscription required)
  • Atlas, Allan (Fall 2011). "On the proportions of the passacaglia (fourth movement) of Vaughan Williams's Fifth Symphony". The Musical Times. 152 (1916): 19–32. JSTOR 23037971. (subscription required)

Further reading [edit]

  • Expressway, Lionel (1984). "Tallis: Vaughan Williams: Howells: Reflections on Mode Three". Tempo (149): 2–13. doi:10.1017/S0040298200058496. JSTOR 945078. (subscription required)

External links [edit]

  • Score and parts from IMSLP
  • "Complete performance in Gloucester Cathedral, with page-turning full score". YouTube. Archived from the original on 22 Dec 2021. Retrieved 14 March 2016.

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