Christopher Webber <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>I've always been disturbed and shaken by the fact that VW's last major
>utterance was this gloom-laden, pessimistic, unquiet 9th, so very different
>from the Bunyanesque visionary of the 5th, or even the Prospero-calm of the
>6th [...] In many ways VW's 9th is closer in spirit to those equally unquiet
>last symphonies of Nielsen and Shostakovich.  Nihilism beckons.
>Certainly  the work does seem to suggest that VW's pugnacious agnosticism
>was cracking at the edges, and perhaps the firebrand young atheist was
>gaining sway once again!

I question this interpretation, even or rather more accurately, this
approach to Vaughan-Williams as a general rule.  The older RVW grew in
years, the younger became his stride, I think.  But as age has a more
sure confidence then youth, RVW found with advancing years that impetus
that gathers power from its own functioning, as fertility so increased
with its own flowering.  But this shouldn't come so much from prodigy as
from saturation, like in late Beethoven or late Verdi.  Except from that
this sheer power - or violence if you want - is an expression for his age
with electricity and speed (and Fascism?), I don't think that any of his
symphonies - at least not from the F-Minor and onwards has any message or
doctrine, or at all dabble at all with any kind of preeching of moral
problems such in Beethoven or Bax symphonies.

>(no nuclear wastes there for me, just a profound, deeply consoling
>sleep!)

Yep.  I agree wholeheartly if you meant with "deeply consoling sleep" what
I would call "much consistentce and less consciousness of artistery".  True
RVW came up with something new in almost every work I know of.  Still, like
as the case of Brahms, his province was logics, and not ethics or anything
else.  If you draw a line from Mozarts "Jupiter"-finale (where he inserted
this infamous four-note motif as a new characteristic device, inspired by
J.S.Bach!), over the last movement in the Beethoven Choral-Symphony to
Brahms F-Major symphony, the way of how Brahms was trapped up in a sort
of loop, consistently but lesser consciously put more importance to the
finale, I think RVW can be the extension of this "development" - or rather
evolving.  If you compare the finale of Brahms F-Major symphony with the
finale of RVWs F-Minor symphony, you will find an ocean of similarities,
not just the similar logig solutions, the similar insertions of fugual
epilogues, or the focus on the tonal centre of F, but interestingly RVWs
work with the famous Brahmsian motto, which occurs among other places in
the finale to the F-Major symphony: F-A-F!  (the more famous F-A-E was
actually Joseph Joachims motto, although often mixed up with Brahms').
And the principal of the two themes that RVW presents in the beginning of
his F-Minor symphony (and which runs throughout the symphony, and which
both are four-note motives), is except for a halfnote in difference
identical to the ....B-A-C-H theme!!!  ...Which I think should be a good
support for my theory of RVW astetics (and "Jam jacet bic stark dead/ never
a tooth in his head!").

Mats Norrman
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