July 9 & 22, 2014
Composers At War: Ralph Vaughan Williams, pt. 1 & 2
(Cale Wiggins)
No one throws a "going out of business" party like Europe does. The 19th century was an unprecedented era of ascendancy and dominance by European powers. They kicked off the 20th century by burning the whole structure to the ground in a conflict that would later earn the unfortunate designation of "the first world war," and this August marks one-hundred years since the first shots were fired. The world had never before seen destruction on such a grand scale, and it had a stultifying effect on the human spirit. For all intents and purposes, music ceased to be made during the war. Death on an unimaginable scale has a funny way of stealing one's mojo.
Like most rank-and-file Europeans, composer Ralph Vaughan Williams did not see the war coming. Even as the continent's powers began to ratchet up their military machines, Williams was busy working out "The Lark Ascending;" a piece so uplifting and peaceful that it positively buoys the soul. Soon, he would be swept up in the dark current of human events; the undertow grabbing at his ankles, longing to pull him under.
At the age of 42, Williams was determined to risk his life in defense of England. Despite the fact that he was well over the maximum age limit for soldiers, the military accepted Williams. He was given the rank of sergeant and stashed away, far from the possibility of combat, with a special constabulary unit in Chelsea. Determined to make a larger contribution to the war effort, Williams immediately volunteered for the Royal Army Medical Corps. Having already established himself as a respected composer, Williams could have used his considerable influence to secure a cherry position. He chose the rank of private when he was transferred to a field ambulance unit in London.
Williams' unit trained in the neighborhood of Stonehenge, on the Salisbury Plain. The regimen was physically demanding, especially for a man of 42, but Williams managed to get through with a certain amount of élan, quickly making friends with the younger soldiers and performing even the lowliest camp duties with a smile on his face.
After his unit was transferred to Dorking, England, Williams did his best to help morale, organizing camp concerts and a military band. He also helped form a choir and a handful of smaller ensembles, and was known to mischievously improvise voluntaries on music hall songs while playing organ at unit church services.
Williams passed two years in this way. News from the front was progressively grim, and the arthritis that afflicted Williams' wife worsened to a debilitating point. The darkness of the times penetrated Williams, and he developed writer's block, producing no new works of any kind. Only his conversations with his good friend Gustav Holst, who was too fragile for war (even in dire times), kept his spirits from flat lining.
In June of 1916, Williams' unit was finally posted to France. On the eve of his departure, he wrote Holst:
"We are on the eve - all packed and ready - I can't say more. Write to me occasionally, my wife will give you the Address.
... I sometimes feel that the future of musical England rests with you - because every [student] who goes out... will infect ten others & they in their turn will infect ten others - I will leave you to make the necessary calculations.
... I feel that perhaps after the war England will be a better place for music than before - largely because we shan't be able to buy expensive performers like we did."
To describe the conditions of the Western Front as it was when Williams arrived invites hyperbole. The trenches were filled with stinking mud and human waste. Bodies of fallen soldiers were often left there for long periods, with no break in the shelling that might allow their proper removal. For miles in both directions, the front was a desolate moonscape, perforated with craters flooded with water and big enough to swallow a horse. The air was constantly filled with the screams of artillery and of the wounded and dying. As an ambulance orderly, Williams got more than his share of the latter.
In 1917, Williams received the news that several of his former pupils and colleagues had been killed in combat. He was especially affected by the death of George Butterworth - one of his generations most promising musical talents - who served bravely, and was awarded the Military Cross shortly before being shot by a sniper in the Somme. Williams wrote his friend Holst:
"I sometimes dread coming back to normal life with so many gaps - especially of course George Butterworth - he has left most of his manuscripts to me - & now I hear that [Bevis] Ellis is killed... I sometimes think that it is wrong to have made friends with people much younger than oneself - because soon there will be only the middle-aged left - & I have got out of touch with most of my contemporary friends - but then there is always you & thank heaven we have never got out of touch."
Following his mirthless circuit from battlefield to hospital to battlefield, ad infinitum, Williams began dreaming of, and longing for, England. Not "lambkins frisking, as most people take for granted," as he put it, but an internalized England of the mind; the poems of George Herbert; the mystical writings of Bunyan and Blake; the sylvan landscapes of Samuel Palmer. It was in this state of mind that Williams' ambulance, on an otherwise inauspicious evening, crested a steep hill, suddenly bringing into view what Williams described as "a Corot-like landscape in the Sunset." It was this incident, along with another when he heard a lone bugle call rising from battle that struck him as the epitome of loneliness and longing, that Williams credited for reigniting his creative desire. In the midst of chaos, Williams managed a feat that very few of his peers could: writing music at the front. Still serving in the ambulance unit, Williams began to sketch parts for what would become his third symphony. In doing so, Williams achieved a sort of personal victory while swimming in an ocean of loss, but the war was far from over, and Mars was not through with Ralph Vaughan Williams. Soon the powers that were would pluck him up from the fields of Flanders, feeling that an individual of his abilities was being wasted as a mere ambulance orderly.
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One of the greatest myths about warfare is that, if dangerous, it is also terribly exciting. What it's actually like for most that experience it: long periods of mind-numbing boredom interspersed with rare incidents of sheer terror. The trench warfare of the Western Front turned that formula on its head, with near constant artillery barrages creating a general state of terror followed by occasional (and often, inexplicable) brief periods of respite.
In early 1916, Ralph Vaughan Williams' unit was shipped from the killing fields of the Western Europe, to Salonica, Greece on the Eastern Front, where the allied forces were fighting the nearly dissipated Ottoman Empire. At the start of World War I, the Ottoman Empire was known for many years as "the sick old man of Europe." They absolutely pasted British and commonwealth forces at Gallipoli, but that was more about allied incompetence than Ottoman strength. For the most part, life on the Eastern Front was numbingly uneventful.
In Salonica, Williams was able to enjoy a bit of Greek culture, frequently watching and writing down folk songs and dances, but spent an otherwise cold and boring winter camped at the foot of Mount Olympus. The clock's progress stalled. Williams spent his days in a draughty tent, huddling over improvised braziers made from empty food tins in an effort to keep warm. The camp was not, however, entirely devoid of spirit. In December, 1917, Williams managed to organize the singing of Christmas Carols, in the shadow of the towering home to the pagan Greek gods.
Just when Williams' unit moved closer to the fighting, higher-ups in the British military decided a man of his upbringing and intellect was wasted in an ambulance unit. Williams, who had an egalitarian spirit and had become quite close to the men in his unit, was not happy with the news, but had no choice but to follow orders.
After a course of officer training, Williams was reposted to France, this time with the lengthy title of Second Lieutenant in the Royal Garrison Artillery in charge of transport and musical recreation in Rouen; a 27 syllable way of saying "hostler."
When Williams was reposted to France, the Germans were shelling Paris with their long-range "Big Bertha" artillery guns. Within a matter of months the Allies pushed them back and many began to feel that the war was approaching a conclusion.
Williams wrote to Gustav Holst:
"The war has brought me strange jobs - can you imagine me in charge of 200 horses! That's my job at present - I was dumped down into it straight away, and before I had time to figure out which were horses and which were wagons I found myself in the middle of a retreat - as a matter of fact we had a very easy time over this - only one horse killed so we were lucky."
"At present I am down near the sea undergoing a 'gunnery course' - more of a rest than anything else - but it's given me an opportunity of learning something about my gun (among other things). Having been trained as a 6'' Howitzer man I've been bunged into a 60 pounder!"
Following the unconditional surrender of Germany in November, 1918, an exhausted Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote to Holst (now in his own musical posting in Salonica):
"I am still out here - slowly trekking towards Germany, not a job I relish, either the journey or its object. I've seen Namur and Charleroi and was disappointed by both - every village we pass is hung with flags and triumphal arches..."
"... It's a tiresome job watering and feeding horses in the dark before we start... then usually two or three wagons stick in the mud on the first start off and worry and delay ensues, and finally when one gets to one's destination one has to set up one's horse lines and find water and fill up nose bags etc. And if this has to be done in the dark it beggars description - so you see there's not much music writing going on at present. But I've started a singing class and we are practicing Xmas carols and 'Sweet and Low.'"
In February, 1919, Williams was officially appointed Director of Music to the First Army, in charge of education and musical activities. While the army slowly demobilized, Williams - enthusiastic by nature, especially with anything musical - threw himself into his duties. He left behind an orchestra and a handful of choirs by the time he returned home to England.
Williams was already a fairly renowned composer before the war; the public was familiar with his work. The problem was his experiences had reshaped him. He felt his former mode of composition no longer fit with the person that he had become. At the age of 47, undaunted, Williams took up the struggle to find a new way of expressing himself musically; a mode better suited and more true to the changed man who now controlled his pen.
* * *
If there is one figure connecting nearly all of the English composers of WWI it is Ralph Vaughan Williams. He seems to have known almost all of them.
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He was already considered a leading British composer with two symphonies, an opera and a considerable body of orchestral music and songs already to his name, not to mention his roles in the English Folk Song Revival and hymnology.
His second symphony, A London Symphony, had received its first performance in 1914, and he had begun preliminary sketches of what is now probably his most famous work, The Lark Ascending, which is sometimes interpreted as a piece about the war.
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Maurice Ravel, who had tutored Vaughan Williams in orchestration in 1907-8 also became an ambulance driver.
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Medical orderlies were called upon to rescue wounded and dying soldiers, often from within the battlefield area while under heavy bombardment, sometimes in complete darkness only lit by occasional flares; Cecil Coles, another war composer was killed while acting as a stretcher-bearer.
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A common thread of WW1 veterans is that they rarely spoke of their experiences, and Vaughan Williams was no exception, but the psychological strain of walking around no-mans' land picking up the remains of men, the endless bombardments and grave news about his contemporaries must have tolled on the composer whose pre-war existence was as a comfortable upper-class artist.
The composer disliked extra-musical associations being made with his works, but his Pastoral Symphony (completed June 1921) and cantata Dona Nobis Pacem (1936) are usually regarded as his musical responses to the War; of the Pastoral Symphony he wrote to his future wife Ursula in 1938 that:
It's really wartime music - a great deal of it incubated when I used to go up night after night with the ambulance wagon at Ecoivres. [...]
Indeed, the Pastoral Symphony is a quiet, but unsettling work of misty strings and woodwind, the intentionally mistuned Last Post and ghostly solo female voice both seem to drift above the orchestra in passages of great beauty, but also ultimately lacking resolution.
Dona Nobis Pacem is a more overt memorial, being a setting of Christian texts interposed with the poetry of Walt Whitman, whose poetry Vaughan Williams set in his first major success, the Sea Symphony of 1910.
Fontes:
http://www.capradio.org/music/classical/2014/06/09/composers-at-war-ralph-vaughan-williams,-pt-1
http://www.capradio.org/music/classical/2014/07/22/composers-at-war-ralph-vaughan-williams,-pt-2
http://www.warcomposers.co.uk/vaughanwilliams.html
Mais:
http://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxwrrqPyqsnIWm9Rd0UyRWdmZEk
Edward Elgar
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0bcRCCg01I (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Planets)
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/australians-americans-british-forces-broke-hindenburg-line
