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Symphony No. 9 (Vaughan Williams)
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The Symphony No. 9 in E Minor was written by the British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams from 1956 to 1957 and given its premiere performance in London by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Malcolm Sargent on April 2, 1958, in the composer's eighty-sixth year. It was subsequently performed on August 5, 1958 by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Malcolm Sargent at a Promenade Concert. It proved to be Vaughan Williams's last symphony: He died on the 26th of that August, the day that the symphony was due to be recorded by the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Adrian Boult.
Vaughan Williams’s original idea was to create a programmatic symphony based on Thomas Hardy's book Tess of the D'Urbervilles, even though the programmatic elements eventually disappeared as work on the composition progressed.
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Encyclopedia
The Symphony No. 9 in E Minor was written by the British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams from 1956 to 1957 and given its premiere performance in London by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Malcolm Sargent on April 2, 1958, in the composer's eighty-sixth year. It was subsequently performed on August 5, 1958 by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Malcolm Sargent at a Promenade Concert. It proved to be Vaughan Williams's last symphony: He died on the 26th of that August, the day that the symphony was due to be recorded by the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Adrian Boult.
Vaughan Williams’s original idea was to create a programmatic symphony based on Thomas Hardy's book Tess of the D'Urbervilles, even though the programmatic elements eventually disappeared as work on the composition progressed. Existing sketches clearly indicate that, in the early stages of composition, certain passages related to specific people and events in the novel: in some of the manuscripts, the first movement is headed "Wessex Prelude", and the heading "Tess" appears above sketches for the second movement.
The work is in four movements
- Moderato maestoso
- Andante sostenuto
- Scherzo: Allegro pesante
- Andante tranquillo
It is worth noting that the opening theme of the slow movement comes from music Vaughan Williams had composed more than fifty years earlier: A Sea Symphony and an even earlier, unpublished tone poem from 1904 called The Solent. The composer himself called the drumbeat music that immediately follows this theme, “the ghostly drummer of Salisbury Plain.”
Instrumentation
The triple woodwind section of the orchestra (piccolo and two flutes, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and double bassoon) is augmented by three saxophones (two E-flat altos and one B-flat tenor). A B-flat flugelhorn joins a brass section of four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, and tuba. An augmented perscussion section includes glockenspiel, xylophone, side drum, tenor drum, bass drum, cymbals, triangle, a very large gong, tam-tam, deep bells, celesta and timpani. The score also calls for two harps and the customary strings.
Vaughan Williams's program note accompanying the premiere performance remarked thus:
"The usual symphony orchestra is used with the addition of three saxophones and flugelhorn. This beautiful and neglected instrument is not usually allowed in the select circles of the orchestra and has been banished to the brass band, where it is allowed to indulge in the bad habit of vibrato to its heart's content. While in the orchestra it will be obliged to sit up and play straight. The saxophones, also, are not expected, except possibly in one place in the scherzo, to behave like demented cats, but are allowed to be their own romantic selves. Otherwise the orchestra is normal, and is, the composer hopes, sound in wind and strings."
Critical Reception
According to Vaughan Williams biographer Michael Kennedy, at its first performances "there was no denying the coolness of the critics' reception of the music. Its enigmatic mood puzzled them, and more attention was therefore paid to the use of the flugel horn and to the flippant programme note." Critic Murray Shafer remarked that the work is notable only "because of [Vaughan Williams's] reputation as a symphonist, and because the composition of the 9th shortly before his death prolongs a certain well-known legend" and "[found] it difficult...to discover much more than a numerical value in the work." He went on to complain about the saxophones and flugelhorn that "all this extra color seems to be employed simply in thickening the middle-orchestra texture, the one area of the orchestra which does not need extra support." Unenthusiastic early reaction, along with the unusual instrumental requirements, may have kept the symphony from having the kind of sustained performance history that most of the others have enjoyed. The flugelhorn player at the premiere was David Mason, who remarked that all the press coverage was about the flugelhorn, to the detriment of serious discussion of the symphony as a work.
Many critics and writers now consider Vaughan Williams's last symphony to be one of his greatest works. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians calls this symphony "the most impressive achievement" of Vaughan Williams's final decade and remarks that "both outer movements employ highly original structures – the carefully graded and layered engineering of rhythmic momentum in the first movement is especially striking – and the work offers one of Vaughan Williams's most impressive essays in finely balanced tonal and modal ambiguities."
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