Ralph Vaughan Williams … Vindicating his personal vision.
“It’s really wartime music – a great deal of it incubated when I
used to go up night after night in the ambulance wagon at Ecoivres and
we went up a steep hill and there was wonderful Corot-like landscape in
the sunset. It’s not really lambkins frisking at all, as most people
take for granted.”
Ralph Vaughan Williams was talking about one of his most controversial and misunderstood pieces, A Pastoral Symphony,
his third, which he completed in 1922. It’s easy to see where the
confusion comes from: here is that master of nostalgic evocation calling
a piece “pastoral”, immediately asking audiences to hear it – you’d
have thought – as the acme of all things quaintly, gently rustic, the
sound of an imagined idyll of English landscape turned into sound.
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