Vaughan Williams: String Quartet in A minor (No.2, 1943) For Jean on her birthday
Prelude:- Allegro appassionato
Romance:- Largo
Scherzo:- Allegro
Epilogue “Greetings from Joan to Jean”:- Andante sostenuto
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 would be the last to need help from any anniversary, yet a more imaginative use of the year 2006 should have proved rather more enlightening. RVW died nearly seventy years ago, and it could be that the attention he received in 2008 is proving to have served him rather better. As with so many composers who have achieved 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. So this “String Quartet in A minor” (as it appears on the title page) may provoke, surprise, and even shock.
To begin with, it is not really in A minor at all; certainly the first movement is centred in that key, but there is little trace of it thereafter. Who knows whether the “progressive tonality” of Nielsen and Mahler was a conscious influence here? From the expected A minor conclusion of the Prelude we suddenly find the ensuing Romance has slipped down a tone into G minor; hereafter the movements are linked not by key but by pitch, so that the Scherzo sets off from the final note G of the Romance – but (via four degrees of a whole tone scale, quoted from his film music for The 49th Parallel) twists into F minor, whose key note is subsequently retained to open the Epilogue in F major – yet for the final section we have modulated to D major, where the quartet comes to rest – the subdominant of the official A minor, it is true; but hardly a relationship that has any meaningful significance, having arrived there via a tortuous voyage of disorientating tonality and tonal non-relationships. But that is not all; if we have come to expect a folk influenced modal diatonicism from an essentially tonal composer we might not be prepared for the harmonic language of this work, reaching as it does a density of dissonance in the scherzo which recalls similar passages in Shostakovich’s 12th and 13th quartets – except that these were still over twenty years into the future.
It is not only pitches which link the last three movements, but also the instrument which plays them – and herein lies the clue to the quartet’s subtitle; in an unfortunate review in The Guardian many years ago, a somewhat arrogant young critic rudely claimed to have “no idea who Jean Stewart was but that she can’t have been very pleased with her present”… Undoubtedly there will be listeners today who also know nothing of this highly eminent viola player, who died in 2002 aged 87. But despite the ignorance of the aforementioned writer, it is clear that the composer himself had the highest regard for her, to judge by the prominence of her part – which at times runs the risk of undermining the integrity of fundamental quartet sound and ensemble. She was required to begin and end every movement (apart from the close of the Prelude), and to demonstrate a far wider range of tone and expression than is normally associated with this “Cinderella of the strings” – as she herself referred to it, going on to describe the fiendish difficulties and challenges of the scherzo in particular, whilst acknowledging that she had really let herself in for it by suggesting to him that it should be “wicked”. Nevertheless, the quartet writing overall proves highly idiomatic, resourceful, and colourful, the whole range of which is encapsulated in the second and longest movement, as it moves from an ironically (for a Romance) desolate fugality (marked to be played without vibrato) to a rich chorale in eight parts – which could so easily be dismissed as bad quartet writing, were it not that the unearthly impression created fully justifies the minefield of double-stops confronting all four players.
So much for background and technicalities. But what of its ambiguous message? The year of composition will undoubtedly assist here, which further research reveals as falling between Symphonies 5 and 6. The onslaught of sheer violence in the Fourth had already caught out those listeners who had imagined that the sinister political tide in mainland Europe during the thirties would somehow have passed VW by (Sir Adrian Boult once famously remarked that “he saw it all”). Although this later gave way to the elevated serenity of the Fifth (prompting suggestions of a final haven of peace for the benign old man), the grim war-inspired turbulence of the Sixth was still to erupt. Those who had already attended the first performance of this quartet – in the National Gallery on the composer’s own 72nd birthday, 12th October 1944 – should have seen it coming, for both the Prelude and the Scherzo quite explicitly point the way. And maybe the bleakness of the Sixth’s extraordinary sempre pianissimo Epilogue is equally foreshadowed at the opening of the Romance. In the light of all this, the biggest surprise of all might still prove to be the unprepared reconciliation provided by the quartet’s own Epilogue – eventually happening upon the seemingly tranquil and unclouded D major of the Fifth. Or maybe in the end this was intended as no more than a touching acknowledgment of the original purpose for the work – as a birthday present. The “Joan” in the title is none other than Joan of Arc, a reference (by way of its main theme) to an aborted project for an opera. But the heroic girl from Orléans was not exactly one to stand by while the evils of the world were played out.
© Alan George
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