My favorite Vaughan Williams
Dec 1st, 2005 by Debra Murphy
I originally set up my bedroom desk, now under piles of piles of manuscripts and miscellany, as a cozy little area to be used strictly for “reading and writing”. (That’s in contrast to my “work” desk down in the basement office/dungeon of Idylls Press proper.) Beginning the daunting task of reclamation this morning—my friend Barb describes these efforts, for us book-loving pack-rats, as “excavation”—I turned on NPR’s Performance Today program. And, as luck would have it, was almost immediately distracted by a lovely performance of one of my favorite pieces, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis.
As those of you who’ve read The Mystery of Things might have guessed, I love Vaughan Williams. I’m not ready, perhaps, to put him in the same league with Bach and Beethoven and Mozart, but something in his music strikes a far more personal chord in me than anything, no matter how exquisite, by B, B or M. (Perhaps it is VW’s bone marrow-deep Englishness.) In the novel, I used VW’s The Lark Ascending as a tag for the protagonists’ sense of unfulfilled longing—that longing which is so common in young people trying to find their path in life. 
For Lupe, the longing in the music, the song of the lark in flight, represented her longing for “erotic” love—that eros which, in its best sense, leads to and is the sacramental this-earth form of agape. For James, the song of the lark represented a tragic longing for lost (never known) familial love; the kind of love every child deserves, but which so many in our family-unfriendly times never experience.
To me, Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis represents a different sort of longing: for the infinite; for God. Whenever I hear this piece, I feel as if I’m on my knees before the Blessed Sacrament in a vast Gothic cathedral, lit only by sunlight filtered through stained glass. If Bernini’s famous statue of The Ecstacy of St. Teresa had a soundtrack, I think it would be this piece.
Speaking of soundtracks, I first discovered Vaughan Williams via the radio (God bless NPR!) when I was a teen back in the late sixties, and I always wondered why some resourceful filmmaker didn’t adapt this music for the screen. Well, somebody finally did, and who else but Peter Weir? Weir used the middle movement of Beethoven’s Emperor concerto to gorgeous effect in, I believe, three movies, classics all in their own right: Picnic at Hanging Rock, Dead Poets Society, and Fearless. Weir also helped bring Gorecki’s First Symphony to the popular attention in Fearless—if memory serves, it was no. 1 on the classical music charts that year. So who else but Weir to “discover” Vaughan Williams’ Tallis fantasy and use it in that heartbreaking man-overboard scene in Master and Commander?
Way to go, Peter, you have great taste; it precisely coincides with my own!
Alas, the live Tallis Fantasy (recorded at the University of Illinois, my alma mater) played this morning on Performance Today doesn’t appear to be available on disc. It was a fine performance, and avoided that plague of too many VW recordings: hastiness. (Let us not be hasty), as Treebeard would say. This music should be savored, lingered over. It is too frequently played in a hurry, at least in the more recent recordings. Pfooey! (I suspect the temptation in The Lark Ascending is a show-off solo violinist, who wants to impress us with his/her virtuosity…NO!)
Anyhow, if you’re looking for good recordings of almost anything VW, you can’t do better than the London Philharmonic recordings from the sixties and seventies, conducted by Sir Adrian Boult. (The Fantasy is available at Amazon here,and the Lark Ascending is available at Arkiv Music, along with some other lovely VW tracks. Oh, and if you’re needing some fabulous Christmas music, you couldn’t do better than Adrian Boult’s recording of VW Christmas oratorio, Hodie, and VW’s Fantasia on Christmas Carols. The soloists are the incomparable John Shirley Quirk and Dame Janet Baker, my favorite baritone and mezzo, respectively.
Mom, lovely post! Had me scrounging around my Eugene CDs for copies of VW, but alas they’re all in Salem. I look forward to some Williams listening over X-Mas break.
P.S. love the Bernini pic. I’m in the middle of an essay right now on Andrea Pozzo, a Jesuit contemporary of Bernini’s who owed a lot to the Master’s style. I love the Baroque: all swirling drapery, heightened emotionality, and theatrical lighting effects. In fact, your writing style is very “baroque.” A slap in the face to all those stripped-down modernists.
Just between you and me and the fencepost, dear, I’m working on acquiring a few more of those old Adrian Boult recordings for Christmas. As you know, Rach and I both listen to a lot of VW down in the Dungeon, and we’re sick and tired of all those hasty recordings!