A Sea Symphony

A Sea Symphony is a choral symphony by Ralph Vaughan Williams, composed 1903-1909. It is the first and longest simultaneously Symphony Vaughan Williams'. It was premiered at the Leeds Festival in 1910 conducted by the composer, at its 38th birthday. The musical maturity of the work belies the youth of the composer's time. Vaughan Williams was 30 when he started composing. The Sea Symphony is one of the first symphonies, in which the chorus is used as a permanent element and an integral part of the score. Thus they became the model for a new era of symphonic music in the first half of the 20th century in England. The plant is sometimes referred to as Vaughan Williams' Symphony No. 1.

The origin and first performance were almost the same time as also operating with a constant chorus of Gustav Mahler 's Symphony No. 8, which was exactly one month earlier, listed on 12 September 1910 for the first time.

• 6.1 Further Reading
• 6.2 Notable recordings

History

From 1903 to 1909 Ralph Vaughan Williams worked repeatedly on a series of songs for chorus and orchestra that his longest symphony and his first major work should ever be in the final result. The initial title was still The Ocean. The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, however, lists 16 previously created works of Vaughan Williams, including two with a choir. The vast majority of these works but are early works that were never published and the composer also long since retired. Never before Vaughan Williams has tried to publish such an extensive and challenging work. Similar to Johannes Brahms Vaughan Williams hesitated long before he presented his first symphony. But then he was a very prolific composer until the end of his life. His last symphony he composed from 1956 to 1958 and finished it at the age of 85

Musical structure

With about 70 minutes of playing time A Sea Symphony is the longest of all the symphonies by Vaughan Williams. Although this symphony far from the old German tradition of a classical symphony, but in a sense it follows the usual symphonic structure: faster opening sentence, slow movement, scherzo and finale. The four movements are:

• A Song for All Seas, All Ships - A song for all seas and all ships ( baritone, soprano and chorus)
• Scherzo: The Waves - Waves (chorus )
• The Explorers - The Discoverers ( baritone, soprano and chorus)

The first set takes about 20 minutes, the inner movements eleven and eight minutes, the final 30 minutes.

Text

The text of the Sea Symphony comes from Walt Whitman's poem cycle blades of grass. Although these poems were then quite unknown in England, they have exerted on Vaughan Williams a big impact because of their ability to combine both metaphysical and human perspectives. Whitman's use of the " free verse " was at that time in the creative world of men ever known, in the flowing structures were becoming more popular and replaced the traditional metric forms. Vaughan Williams related in his Sea Symphony following poems:

Music

Orchestration

The symphony is designed for soprano, baritone, chorus and large orchestra consisting of two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, E-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, Tuba, Timpani (F # 2 -F3 ), percussion ( snare drum, bass drum, triangle, tambourine, cymbals ), two harps, organ, and strings.

However, in order to allow the work to a higher number of performances, Vaughan Williams has also held a smaller cast admissible.

Influences

Comparisons to Charles Villiers Stanford, Hubert Parry and Edward Elgar are close. Not only that, all four worked at the same time and in the same country, Vaughan Williams not only studied with Stanford and Parry together at the Royal College of Music, but his preparations for the composition of his " Sea Symphony " included both Elgar's Enigma Variations ( 1898-99 ) and his oratorio The Dream of Gerontius ( 1900).

A Sea Symphony is one of the most famous pieces of music that dealt with the theme of the ocean, which were then written about the same time in England. Are also part of Stanford's Songs of the Sea (1904) and Songs of the Fleet ( 1910), Elgar's Sea Pictures (1899 ), Frank Bridges The Sea (1910 ) and of course the now well-known piece La Mer by Claude Debussy from France. All of these pieces may have played a role, why Vaughan Williams just turned to this subject for his first major work.

Vaughan Williams had studied in 1908 for three weeks with Maurice Ravel in Paris. While he worked intensively on the instrumentation, a sharp contrast to the German symphonic tradition as they had taught at the Royal College of Music, Stanford and Parry he developed. At the time, Vaughan Williams began to develop a greater sense of color and unusual chord progressions. His preference for mediant relationships, which should be a continuous harmonious principle of the Sea Symphony, may have prepared in these former studies, and this harmony ratios are now symptomatic of his musical style at all.

The Sea Symphony uses both the pentatonic scale and the whole tone scale, which was then actually regarded as more characteristic of contemporary French music. Such kind of music floated before Vaughan Williams, as he completed the composition of the Sea Symphony from 1908 to 1909. Ravel made ​​him a great compliment by saying, " Vaughan Williams is the only one of my students, the not so composed as I am".

Topics

Musically, the Sea Symphony contains two strong unifying motifs. The first is a harmonious motif of two chords in major and minor. That's the first thing that ever happens in the symphony: a brass fanfare in B flat minor, followed by a choral passage in the same key. During the chorus, the verse " Behold, the ..." sings, uses the full orchestra at the word "sea " and triggers the musical development in D Major on. The second motif is a melodic figure that is played to the text " And, on its limitless heaving breast ... " throughout the first set through. If you want to describe these musical ratios in the usual method of counting the individual rhythms, one could describe the pattern as " 1 2 3-2-3 4", indicating that the second cycle is divided into eighth notes (with the words " on its " ) and the third clock is divided in triplets (with the word" limitless ").

Reception and succession

The public impact of the "Sea Symphony " has left its mark not only in the life of the composer, who has presented the same with his Opus 1 such an ambitious and comprehensive work, but it has at the same time the English symphonic music of the 20th century and the English music generally introduced sustainable global attention. Hugh Ottaway writes in his book Vaughan Williams Symphonies:

" The English Symphony is almost entirely a creation of the 20th century. As Vaughan Williams in 1903 began to compose songs for chorus and orchestra, which later on, Sea Symphony ' were, Elgar had not yet shown as a symphonic composer. And oddly enough was Elgar's first symphony of 1908, the first ever symphony of an English composer who was added to the repertoire ... And as Vaughan Williams had completed his Ninth Symphony in 1958, a few months before his death at the age of 85, was the English symphony as genre become an independent subject. And it is quite obvious that Vaughan Williams has played a crucial role in this process. During all this period he was constantly integrated into the musical life of the country and active, not only as a composer but also as a teacher, conductor, organizer, and increasingly as a tutor of young people. "

In another article of the journal Grove Ottaway and Frogley wrote about Vaughan Williams' music that she was " ... a triumph of instinct over the environment. The root is optimistic. Whitman's enthusiasm for the unity of being and the brotherhood of man is reflected clearly and vitality of the best in them has proved enduring. Whatever may also mean the obligation Parry and Stanford, and in the end also Elgar opposite, there is no doubt about the pure physical exhilaration or visionary enthusiasm ... " ( Vaughan Williams' music).

Ursula Vaughan Williams, his widow, has written a detailed biography of her husband, where she describes the key points of his philosophy:

" ... He was the collective aspirations of the generations of men and women of his time deliberately, with whom he felt deeply connected. And so there is in his work a fundamental tension between traditional concepts of faith and morals, and a modern spiritual anguish, which is also visionary. "