VAUGHAN WILLIAMS Willow-Wood the Sons of Light Toward the Unknown Region Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus
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557798bk VW US 14/9/05 3:51 pm Page 12 VAUGHAN WILLIAMS Willow-Wood The Sons of Light Toward the Unknown Region Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus Roderick Williams, Baritone Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra David Lloyd-Jones 557798bk VW US 14/9/05 3:51 pm Page 2 Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) from the deep thought wherein he slept Light shall be light for ever and the darkness night, Willow-Wood • Toward the Unknown Region • The Sons of Light still two days younger than the morning star. Man shall awake and speak their names aloud This is the morning of the sons of light, and set a name on fire and wind and cloud The poems of the American Walt Whitman (1819-1892) into his score when he looks to the psalm tune Sine rejoice because they start upon their way; from whence all living creatures take delight. were published in Leaves of Grass, a collected works Nomine ‘and reaches a blazing climax in the final bars, singing they go, each clothed in his own day, Rejoice, man .stands among the sons of light. which in successive editions over 35 years from 1855 emblematic of the ultimate triumph of the soul’s destiny’. their orbits span the terrors of the height, added new poems at each appearance. Vaughan Williams The cantata Willow-Wood for baritone, women’s swifter than wind, as swift as thought, their flight. may have been first introduced to Whitman by his teacher voices and orchestra first appeared as a scena for baritone Stanford, who in his pioneering Elegiac Ode of 1884 had and piano in March 1903 when it was sung by Campbell Sing and rejoice, vast darkness, that you share been the first significant British composer to respond to McInnes in a concert at St James’s Hall, Piccadilly. Again in equal splendour and in equal power Whitman’s visionary non-sectarian stanzas and the Vaughan Williams set words from Dante Gabriel the glory of creation’s earliest hour. Thanks to Ursula Vaughan Williams for freedom of his verse. Ursula Vaughan Williams tells us Rossetti’s sequence The House of Life. The genesis of Light shines in scattered jewels that you wear, permission to reproduce the words that from 1902 or 1903 Leaves of Grass in various these early works seems to be interrelated, and Michael and sleep the gift that lies within your care. of The Sons of Light. editions was ‘his constant companion’. The outcome of Kennedy has drawn our attention to a motif, also in the this absorption was A Sea Symphony, gradually brought song ‘Love’s Last Gift’, which this time became the into focus over seven years and first heard in 1910. A opening of Willow-Wood. companion piece, started later but completed sooner, was Vaughan Williams orchestrated Willow-Wood soon Toward the Unknown Region. Vaughan Williams after the first performance and later added an ad.lib. remembered that when he and his friend Gustav Holst had women’s chorus (much of it wordless), and in this form it both considered themselves ‘stuck’, they decided they was performed at the Music League Festival in Liverpool should both set the same Whitman text from ‘Whispers of on 25th September 1909, for which Breitkopf and Härtel Heavenly Death’ and jointly select the winner. They duly printed the vocal score. There the soloist was the awarded the palm to Vaughan Williams for this work. It celebrated baritone Frederic Austin, and the conductor the was first performed at the Leeds Festival on 10th October Welsh choral conductor Harry Evans. Despite some 1907 with the composer conducting (doubtless the positive press notices and the fact that the vocal score had Festival conductor, Stanford, insisted that his pupil should been published, it has not been heard again until now. Yet conduct his own work), but when, two months later, it the composer clearly retained an affection for it; even first appeared in London at the Royal College of Music on three years before his death he was attempting to get it re- 10th December 1907 Stanford was on the podium. published. Vaughan Williams referred to the work as a “song for Willow-Wood is the most substantial sequence in The chorus and orchestra” and it was announced thus at the House of Life, consisting of four interlinked sonnets. festival. Hubert Foss has pointed out that the opening Commentators have attempted a number of melody is almost identical to ‘Love’s Last Gift’, the final interpretations of the richly-perfumed but opaque song of Vaughan Williams’s Rossetti sequence The imagery. However, a clue is given by the poet himself in House of Life which included his popular song ‘Silent an article he wrote in 1871. Referring to the first poem Noon’. Percy Young has also drawn our attention to only, Rossetti stated: ‘the sonnet describes a dream or another musical motif that Vaughan Williams subsumes trance of divided love momentarily re-united by the 8.557798 2 11 8.557798 557798bk VW US 14/9/05 3:51 pm Page 10 Man will live by the sun Magic is balanced in the Scales, longing fancy; and in the imagery of the dream, the face the book of Job as God speaks to Job from out of the and the changing moon swing high, swing low, of the beloved rises through deep dark waters to kiss the whirlwind. He adapted the music from the ‘Galliard of and the distant stars the autumn gales lover’. Vaughan Williams seems to have had no problem the Sons of the Morning’ in scene VIII of his ‘masque for till Time is done. and all winds blow. in coming to terms with the poems. His setting creates the dancing’, Job, and later orchestrated it for the Leith Hill Mailed Scorpion has a deadly sting, musical equivalent of a Pre-Raphaelite tableau in which Festival, at Dorking on 16th June 1951. It is remarkable 6 II The song of the Zodiac as sharp as woe, the evocative poetic images are translated into luxuriant how well the words fit what was intended as a balletic Every night of the year there shines and he is king textures. The work is a fine extended vehicle for the score, making one wonder how far Vaughan Williams one of the Zodiac’s twelve signs of creeping ones below. baritone whose widely-ranging melodic line demonstrates had associated words and music in the first place. the composer’s close affinity with the human voice. Written for the New York World’s Fair, Five Run, young Ram, through fields of spring, Brave Archer, bow bent in air, take aim, Willow-Wood owes much of its impact to the Variants of ‘Dives and Lazarus’ was first performed at cloud meadows high, what will you slay? orchestra and the atmosphere associated with the Carnegie Hall by the New York Philharmonic-Symphony the story begins What lurking game women’s choir, especially when they vocalise, a Vaughan Orchestra conducted by Sir Adrian Boult, on 10th June when you cross the sky. at the edge of the day? Williams fingerprint we are now familiar with from so 1939. The same concert saw the first performance of Sir Horns white curved like a crescent moon, Folly and folly shall dance with you, many scores. Like the atmospheric recently re-discovered Arthur Bliss’s barn-storming Piano Concerto, and was golden ring, bright eye, caper, be gay, Nocturne (more from Whitman’s Whispers of Heavenly preceded by Walter Piston’s noisy orchestral Prelude and summer comes soon frisk all night through, Death) for baritone and orchestra, it is clear Vaughan Fugue. The American announcer, having trouble with the when the Bull goes by. dance Goat, while you may. Williams already had a formidable orchestral technique pronunciation of ‘Dives’, interpreted as a single syllable, which in its day, just before Debussy and Ravel were contented himself with ‘Five Variants of an old English Warrior Twins, brother and brother, Is it the water of life you hold generally heard in Britain, must have been considered carol’. adventuring far Water Bearer, in your jar, very advanced and possibly was not treated Vaughan Williams writes in the score: ‘These ride by each other for young and old, sympathetically by Willow-Wood’s no-nonsense first variants are not exact replicas of original tunes, but rather as star beside star. carried from far? conductor. reminiscent of various versions in my own collection and Sideways he goes, Silver linked swimmers, shimmer of scales, In 1946, the Musicians Benevolent Fund, giving those of others.’ While the nearest example listed by the sideways he will go dark weed, cool fins, effect to a long-standing aspiration of the recently folk-song collector Cecil Sharp was collected at the Ross in peace or war, thus ends the tale deceased Sir Henry Wood, revived regular annual St Workhouse, Herefordshire, in 1921, in fact the tune can not fast, not slow, that the Ram begins. Cecilia Day services in London, initially at St Sepulchre’s be traced to the sixteenth century as a carol sung to the so all Crabs are. Every night of the year there shines without Newgate on Holborn Viaduct. From 1947 new words ‘Come all ye faithful Christians’ which Vaughan one of the Zodiac’s twelve signs. works were commissioned every year, starting with the Williams had known from childhood. Each of the five Come summer Lion, come tawny beast Vaughan Williams motet The Voice Out of the Whirlwind, variants was suggested by a different version of the tune.