Arnold Bax

I bought a book from Amazon recently called "The Symphony"; a set of chapters on great composers of the form: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz, Mendelsshon, Schumann, Liszt, Franck, Bruckner, Brahms, Borodin, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Mahler, Elgar, Sibelius, Vaughan-Williams, Rachmaninov and one other whom I did not expect to see there - Arnold Bax.
The book was first published by Penguin in 1949 which is about the time I first bought it. It was on my shelves for a long time but when I looked a few years ago it had gone, I don't know where. So I decided I needed it again when I recently heard Vaughan-Williams' second symphony, known as "The London". No doubt there are many other books from which I could have obtained the information I needed but I suddenly had a nostalgic desire to look again at this book.
It's very good. It's not written by one person but has different authors for each chapter.
As I say, I did not expect to see Sir Arnold Bax's name there; I can't recall that his name was there but, obviously, since it's the same book, not a revised edition, it must have been.
I didn't even know that he wrote symphonies. Elgar, yes. V-Williams, yes. But not Bax. I knew only one piece by Bax and that I think is his most popular work: Tintagel, a tone poem about a castle on the coast of Cornwall. Can't say I like it much. But I must try out a symphony or two of his - from seven - on Youtube.
His name came to mind last week when I watched David Lean's "Oliver Twist": Bax wrote the incidental music for the film. Jolly good too.

Wagner

Sitting here last evening looking at the blank screen of my computer and wondering what I was going to do with the rest of my life - as one does when one gets to my age - I felt rather down in the mouth. I needed something to lift my spirits - I had already read On Line Daily Mail but that hadn't helped much, in fact it had done the opposite - when I suddenly had the bright idea to seek on Youtube a certain Wagnerian "number" with the title "Siegfried's Burial March". Now you wouldn't think that that piece of music from "The Ring" would do anything but make my depression even greater than it was. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong again. Try it for yourself - the Klaus Tennstedt's version with The London Philharmonic Orchestra. It is absolutely thrilling, moving and it lifts the spirits as no other work can do. For me at least.
But what can I say about the work better than Thomas Mann in his essay "The Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner".
"The overpowering accents of the music that accompanies Siegfried's funeral cortege no longer tell of the woodland boy who set out to learn the meaning of fear; they speak to our emotions of what is really passing behind the lowering veils of mist: it is the sun-hero himself who lies on the bier, slain by the pallid forces of darkness - and there are hints in the text to support what we feel in the music: "A wild boar's fury", it says, and : "Behold the cursed boar," says Gunther, pointing to Hagen, "who slew this noble flesh." The words take us back at a stroke to the very earliest picture-dreams of mankind. Tammuz and Adonis, slain by the boar, Osiris and Dionysus, torn asunder to come again as the Crucified One, whose flank must be ripped open by a Roman spear in order that that the world might know Him - all things that ever were and ever shall be, the whole world of beauty sacrificed and murdered by the wintry wrath, all is contained within this single glimpse of myth."

Vaughan-Williams

Sir Thomas Beecham made many a sarcastic remark during his time as conductor of orchestras but none, I think, quite so nasty as the one he made about Ralph Vaughan-Williams's music: words to the effect that while a young man he composed a rather pleasant piece of music when he wrote his Variations on a theme of Thomas Tallis but that "he's been writing the same work ever since".
While this is shear ill will towards a worthy musical craftsman I have to say that there is in it an inkling of truth, not so much that he wrote the same work ever afterwards but that his style is very much that of the early piece. There is something unsatisfying about Vaughan-Williams's compositions, particularly his symphonies.
This week I attended a concert in whch Andrew Davies and the Philharmonia orchestra played his 2nd symphony which I don't think I have ever heard before and was surprised to read that it was one of his most popular works. Now it couldn't have received a betrter performance that that given here since Davies is a great champion of British music ([perhaps it would be more accurate to say "English music" since there is very little Welsh, Scottish or Irish music of a classical/symphonic kind) and the Philhramionia orchestra is one of the best in the world but.... well I was left with a feeling of being somewhat let down. I could see what the composer was doing in introducing snatches of themes but, unlike Sibelius, they did not come together in what I call "the big tune". There were a lot of little intros to tunes but never a culmination into something big, whistle-able, thrilling as in say, Sibelius's 1st and 2nd symphonies.
Maybe Vaughan-Williams worked better with other people tunes as with his variations on a theme of Thomas Tallis or with his Greesleeves with its tune from an original folk tune (though some say Henry 8th wrote it).
One of the problems of coming away from a concert with the snatches of his tunes in your mind is that they stay there for some time. I am still toodle-whodling and humming certain phrases but, like those in the symphony they rarely get anywhere.