William Green examines the overlapping lives of two great English artists: Ralph Vaughan Williams and William Blake.
Ralph Vaughan Williams(RVW) was by all accounts a curmudgeon. Or perhaps, more accurately, he liked to play the curmudgeon. Musical literature of the 20th century is peppered with gruff remarks by the composer when there seemed little call for them. Auckland composer and organist Ron Dellow delighted in telling the story, from his London student days, of finding a seat at a mezzanine cafe that just happened to give him a bird’s-eye view of RVW’s 80th birthday celebrations, and overhearing the great man say, in his best curmudgeonly voice, “Now, I don’t want it put about that I don’t like birthday cake!” Similarly, UK-born – but latterly New Zealand-resident – Margaret Wegener was grateful for the help he gave her as a young composer in getting her music published, but alarmed at their first meeting when the distinguished composer surveyed her for a few seconds before exclaiming, “I thought you’d be taller.”
Curmudgeon or not, Vaughan Williams was an independent thinker and a man of strong opinions that he had no trouble putting forth forcefully, and often dismissively. Having a dissenting voice in his family pedigree (he was the grand-nephew of Charles Darwin) would certainly have helped him express contrary views with confidence. As a child, he was spun the orthodox line by family members on matters such as religion, often with the added proviso, “... although Uncle Charles doesn’t think so.”
Whether English artist and poet William Blake was a curmudgeon is open to debate, but no one could deny his fiercely independent spirit, nor his opinionated nature. Blake was a visionary in the literal sense, in that he saw actual visions and heard voices, for which many regarded him as insane. As a result, Blake felt sidelined and lost few opportunities for trenchant criticism of the mainstream, particularly established religion. His fellow artists were frequently in the firing line, Rubens in particular being “filled with tints and messes ... laid on indiscriminately” and given to filthy brown shadows “somewhat of the colour of excrement.”
Perhaps some sort of bond between the two men led Vaughan Williams to jump at the chance to write music for a ballet based on a selection of Blake’s Illustrations of The Book of Job, for the artist’s centenary, and which Auckland Philharmonia performs on 7 November. RVW’s enthusiasm for the project was baffling. He famously hated ballet so much – especially dancing en pointe – that he insisted the finished product be called ‘a masque for dancing’, even
though critics pointed out that the result isn’t strictly a masque. Vaughan Williams was quite happy when the decadent Diaghilev turned the project down, declaring that the great Russian impresario would have made “an unholy mess of it.”
The result is a long but close-knit score divided into nine scenes, where the agnostic composer delights in depicting God and the angels with triadic music, Job and his family with modal music and Satan with some of the most complex and dissonant music Vaughan Williams had written to date. Douglas Lilburn described Job as a pivotal work, in which his 57-yearold teacher proved he could go far beyond the pastoral style he’d been associated with, a point brought home forcefully five years later in RVW’s Fourth Symphony.
What else did these independent thinkers, Vaughan Williams and Blake, share? A little-known fact about Blake is that, despite having no musical training, he used to compose his own tunes, which were often described as beautiful by those who knew him, and which were sometimes written down by musical professors (sadly, none of this music has survived). Blake often worked in three media simultaneously, making an engraving of his subject while writing a poem about it and setting the result to one of his tunes.
Neither artist gained recognition easily. Vaughan Williams began to be noticed only in his late 30s with the Tallis Fantasia (though one critic thought it “a queer, mad piece by an odd fellow from Chelsea”). Blake’s struggle was greater, and after being branded “an unfortunate lunatic” by the sole reviewer of his 1809 exhibition, he gave up seeking public approval. Near the end of his life, Wordsworth and Coleridge – both Cambridge educated – showed an interest and spoke well of him, although they may have tittered at his idiosyncratic spelling (Blake never even went to school) and Wordsworth thought him mad.
Blake and Vaughan Williams identified strongly with London, and the street cries of this vast and complex city found artistic expression in their work. In A London Symphony, written by Vaughan Williams in 1914, the cries are incorporated into his depiction of a city waking up, with its subsequent hustle and bustle. Blake’s poem ‘London’, on the other hand, deals with social injustice and depicts the poet wandering the streets at midnight and listening to the piteous
cries of chimney sweep and harlots, and the fearful wails of babies born into such an unjust world.
At the very end of his long life, Ralph Vaughan Williams composed the Ten Blake Songs, for voice and oboe, for the Guy Brenton film The Vision of William Blake. Fittingly, the cycle begins with ‘Infant Joy’ and ends with ‘Eternity’, and sure enough, includes ‘London’, which the composer sets as a plaintive cry in free time for voice alone. Following ‘London’ is a simple, diatonic setting of ‘Little Lamb’, a poem Vaughan Williams famously detested, proving perhaps that the crusty composer had softened in his old age.
This poignant work, a meeting of two great minds, was first performed on 8 October 1958, a premiere made more poignant still as the great composer had died in his sleep six weeks earlier. Perhaps these two artistic souls are communing somewhere in another realm, “burning bright” as with Blake’s Tyger, or simply glimpsing “a World in a Grain of Sand/And a Heaven in a Wild Flower.”
The New Zealand Herald Premier Series: Sir Andrew Davis: A Tribute 1944-2024
7.30pm, Thursday 7 November
Auckland Town Hall
Conductor Karl-Heinz Steffens
Piano Ingrid Fliter
Beethoven Leonore Overture No.3
Beethoven Piano Concerto No.3
Vaughan Williams Job – A Masque for Dancing