‘A queer, mad work by an odd fellow from Chelsea.’ Herbert Brewer’s touch upon listening to the premiere of Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis undoubtedly ranks as one of many extra flippantly dismissive put-downs in music historical past.
Brewer was the organist at Gloucester Cathedral, the place the Fantasia was first carried out on 6 September, 1910 as a part of the Three Choirs Competition. The brand new work was a Competition fee, and a big viewers of two,000 was current, primarily as a result of Elgar was conducting his oratorio The Dream of Gerontius within the second half of the live performance.
What impressed Vaughan Williams when composing the Tallis Fantasia?
Whereas Elgar drew closely on the orchestral palette of Nineteenth-century composers reminiscent of Wagner and Richard Strauss, Vaughan Williams seemed a lot additional again in time for his inspiration. As co-editor of The English Hymnal (revealed in 1906) he had come throughout a set of tunes by the English Renaissance composer Thomas Tallis, written for the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Psalter (1567). One particularly caught Vaughan Williams’s consideration – the tune to Psalm 2, ‘Why fumeth in sight: The Gentils spite, In fury raging stout?’
This solemn, timeless melody fashioned the idea of the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. The fashion of ‘fantasia’ Vaughan Williams tailored as a mannequin was not the full-blown tone-poem of the Romantic period, however the extra intimate kind that composers like Purcell and Locke had written for string consort within the early Baroque interval. Vaughan Williams’s Tallis Fantasia was accordingly scored for strings solely, utilizing two predominant teams of gamers plus a quartet of soloists.
What was the response to the Tallis Fantasia?
Vaughan Williams was 37 when he performed the Fantasia’s premiere, and most of his main masterpieces had been but to be written. How would the viewers react to this new piece by a composer whose fame was largely nonetheless to be established? Would a piece which drew so clearly on the previous strike listeners as disappointingly retrograde, in comparison with the ‘progressive’ music of Schoenberg and Webern?
A lot of the response was, actually, in the other way. Within the viewers that night had been Herbert Howells and Ivor Gurney, each aspiring younger composers. Howells was thunder-struck by what he heard within the Tallis Fantasia. ‘For a music-bewildered youth of 17’, he later wrote, ‘it was an awesome night, so disturbing and shifting that I even requested RVW for his autograph – and obtained it!’ Howells and Gurney walked the streets of Gloucester into the early hours that night time, excitedly debating what the Tallis Fantasia may imply for the longer term.
Press response was enthusiastic, too. The Manchester Guardian instantly recognised that the Fantasia was one thing particular – ‘fairly out of the ruts of the commonplace’, as its reviewer put it. The Day by day Telegraph agreed, calling the piece ‘extraordinarily stunning to reminiscent of have ears for one of the best music of all ages’. That timeless high quality additionally impressed the critic of The Instances, who discovered the brand new work ‘stuffed with the visions which have haunted the seers of all instances’.
These predictions that the Tallis Fantasia would stand the check of time have proved correct. The work’s beautifully evocative string writing, drenched with reminiscences of a golden previous and luminous in texture, has regularly come to outline the concept of ‘Englishness’ in music. It’s surpassed solely by The Lark Ascending in lists of Vaughan Williams’s hottest items.
‘The work has the solidity and grandeur of a cathedral, to which its strains appear to belong by a pure affinity,’ one commentator has written. ‘It has handed into the repertory of all the nice orchestras of the world.’
Additionally in September 1910…
2nd The French painter Henri Rousseau dies in Paris, aged 66. A self-taught artist who didn’t take up portray significantly till his 40s, his best-known works reminiscent of The Sleeping Gypsy and Tiger in a Tropical Storm had been typically dismissed by critics however admired by his fellow artists.
Rousseau was additionally a eager composer, whose works included Clémence, a waltz for violin and mandolin.
eleventh Sufficiently rich from his profession as an actor to take up flying, Robert Loraine comes agonisingly shut to creating the primary profitable crossing from Britain to Eire.
Flying a Farman biplane, Lorraine is within reach of the coast at Howth Head when his engine cuts out and he plunges into Dublin Bay. He swims to security and his airplane is later recovered.
twelfth Richard Strauss, Saint-Saëns and Webern are within the viewers as Gustav Mahler (pictured) conducts the primary efficiency of his Symphony No. 8 on the Neue Musik-Festhalle in Germany.
The massive choral and orchestral forces wanted to carry out it give impresario Emil Gutmann the concept of calling it the ‘Symphony of a Thousand’ to assist ticket gross sales, although Mahler doesn’t approve.
twenty second The Duke of York’s Image Home, one of many first cinemas on this planet, opens in Brighton.
Constructed on the location of the outdated Amber Ale Brewery, it’s based by the previous actress Violet Melnotte who, since 1885, has additionally been a number one theatre supervisor. Melnotte and her husband, actor Frank Wyatt, additionally personal the Duke of York’s Theatre within the West Finish.
twenty fifth The New York Instances reveals that Puccini’s new opera La Fanciulla del West is to be premiered on the metropolis’s Metropolitan Opera in December.
As Puccini is presently the world’s most in-demand opera composer, the premiere is one thing of a coup for the Met, which is lower than 30 years outdated. A starry solid together with soprano Emmy Destinn and tenor Enrico Caruso is lined up for the manufacturing.
Learn extra: A information to Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis and its finest recordings
