Vaughan Williams: On Wenlock Edge (1909, AE Housman: A Shropshire Lad)
On Wenlock Edge
From far, from eve and morning
Is my team ploughing?
Oh, when I was in love with you
Bredon Hill
Clun
If the celebrating of a composer’s anniversary has any real lasting value, it is surely through the opportunity afforded for re-appraisal. There seems to have been a concentration of such opportunities over the past few years – missed ones in certain instances: for example, it might be thought that Mozart or Beethoven would be the last to need help from any anniversary, yet a more imaginative use of the years 2006 and 2020 could have proved rather more enlightening. RVW died over sixty years ago, and it could be that the attention he received in 2008 proved to have served him rather better – with his 150th birthday in 2022 providing further incentive to build on all that was achieved on his behalf those seventeen years ago.
As with so many composers who have found fame and recognition through a mere handful of works, there is also an enormous amount of virtually unknown music – a marvellously rich heritage, crying out for exposure and acceptance. But above all, what is waiting to be revealed is the sheer variety, complexity, and versatility of his output. Much as punters have tended to label him as this or that, he is not actually one to be pigeon-holed – and at times this has even been to his disadvantage. It has become all too easy to see him as the archetypal representative of the earlier twentieth century English tradition, with its associated baggage of the Pastoral and the Rustic. Indeed, he did write a “Pastoral” symphony; and a soaringly lyrical piece for violin and orchestra, appropriately entitled The Lark Ascending. Appropriate? More so in this particular instance than meets the eye…. And should we want to think of VW’s music as harmlessly pleasing on the ear, then we had better not delve too deeply into the real origins of those two pieces – and many others like them. The image of a benign British gentleman producing hymn tunes and sacred choral works needs to be seen in the context of his agnosticism, his rebelliousness, and his capacity for sheer anger and protest.
At least this celebrated song-cycle is more familiar than his other works involving a chamber ensemble – even though it pre-dates almost everything else that gets a regular hearing. Edwin Evans (another writer, like Marion Scott, familiar in the mid 20th century for a Master Musicians book) tells us that Vaughan Williams, “….like many another English composer who has gone through the academic mill…had made the discovery that his training had left him inarticulate at the very time when he was ripe for self-expression. He had something to say and was tongue-tied….. As the French composers, whatever they had to say, seemed to have little difficulty in expressing themselves, he thought he might learn from them”. After returning from Paris, where he met D’Indy and studied with Ravel, RVW wrote that “I came back with a bad attack of French fever and wrote a string quartet which caused a friend to say that I must have been having tea with Debussy”. On Wenlock Edge followed right away, and was first performed by Gervase Elwes. Ivor Gurney heard Elwes sing it in 1920, after which he wrote, “Purely English words retranslated and reinforced by almost purely English music – the product of a great mind not always working at the full of its power, but there continually and clearly apparent. The French mannerisms must be forgotten in the strong Englishness of the prevailing mood – in the unmistakable spirit of the time of creation. England is the spring of emotion, the centre of power, and the pictures of her, the breath of her earth and growing things are continually felt through the lovely sound”.
Housman himself, having heard a gramophone record of the first two songs, complained, “I am told that composers in some cases have mutilated my poems – that Vaughan Williams cut two verses out of ‘Is my team ploughing?’ I wonder how he would like me to cut two bars out of his music”. The composer later retorted (somewhat arrogantly and controversially) that “the composer has a perfect right artistically to set any portion of a poem he chooses provided that he does not actually alter the sense… I also feel that a poet should be grateful to anyone who fails to perpetuate such lines as ‘The goal stands up, the keeper/Stands up to keep the goal’” (retained in Butterworth’s setting of the same poem!). The circle was happily completed when Ravel took part in its French première in 1912, writing to the composer that “Everyone is agreed that your lyric poems were a revelation”.
© Alan George
