Vaughan Williams

Stephen Pollard in yesterday's Times wrote about Vaughan Williams that he was the last of the great composers in this country. That when he died, classical music died too.
A bit of an exaggeration perhaps but it has a truth in it; the so-called classical music now being composed appeals only to certain academic types who have followed a different line in composition - that of Berg, Schonberg and their followers. Composers who wrote the sort of music the public might have enjoyed were, sort of, elbowed out of performance venues.
I'm afraid it's true of art in general these days: poets write for other poets, artists produce works that have little interest for ordinary folk etc.
But there seems to be a sort of campaign to bring Vaughan Williams to prominence now; Simon Heffer in The Telegraph writes about him being Britain's greatest composer; Pollard thinks he is the quintessential English composer, and so on.
I think he is a good second-rater with a few compositions under his belt that have passed the test of time. But a lengthy period of lisrening to his music I find is hard going. The Prom tonight is all Vaughan Williams. I'm afraid I would find it rather too much of the same thing, maybe boring. For as Thomas Beecham remarked in that acerbic tongue that often summed up his views on something such, that for all its nastiness and spitefullness, there was usually an element of truth in it, "he once wrote a rather good piece with a Thomas Tallis theme, but after that he seemed to write the same piece over and over again."
The grain of truth here is "yes, there is much about his music that has a sort of sameness about it, as if he is often searching for a tune and only finding one when he uses a traditional folk tune e.g. 'The Lark Ascending'."